General Gender Related Issues

Current issues, news and ethics
Post Reply
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Peering into the future through science

Image

Celebrated annually on 11 February, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science seeks to promote full and equal access for women and girls to participate in scientific endeavours. It's also a day to recognize women and girls' roles in science and technology.

Breaking through barriers

Born and raised in Syria, Namat Aizougi now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, as a licensed practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a pharmacist, artist, poet, and life coach.

Namat
Image

Having graduated as a pharmacist from Aleppo University, she moved to Sweden after being married and set out on her path of success.

Namat had to transfer her academic qualifications to Sweden, learn Swedish, all while caring for a young family. So what inspired her journey? “My love for science, art, chemistry, physiology, philosophy, and nature,” she said, “combined with my curiosity for what life is.”

“I found a path of clues in my passion which led me to pharmaceutical sciences.”

As a proud mother of six daughters, Namat supports and inspires other women and girls to “follow their passion, dare to dream, and believe in yourself. Science is wonderful with endless answers and infinite dimensions.”



Rewriting the narrative

“The narrative of why young girls and women can't do something is often a lot louder and stronger than why they can,” said Numa Dhamani, proud holder of a degree in Physics and Chemistry from The University of Texas at Austin. She currently leads data science development at the Global Disinformation Index.

Numa
Image

For several years, Numa has studied how malign narratives spread across social networks. Previously, she served as the Principal Investigator on several DARPA research programs, contributed to peer-reviewed international research journals, and presented at multiple conferences on disinformation, building responsible and ethical AI, and machine learning research.

These experiences have helped Numa to enable policy changes that respond to the acute problems of misinformation and disinformation. Her work is contributing to improving the accuracy of the information we come across online everyday.

Numa’s advice for young women and girls in science is to “find or build a community of women who encourage, support, and inspire you. Advocate not only for yourself but also for other female scientists and their needs.”



Striving toward a greater purpose

Being the only girl alongside nine boys in a middle school robotics team might sound intimidating to some. But Zaynah Bhanji took it as the motivation she needed to push for success, ultimately leading the team to win a spot at the provincial robotics competition when she was in the eighth grade.

Zaynah
Image

She encourages young women and girls aspiring to study science to “take full advantage of all the opportunities you have. With access to the internet, there are so many resources available to learn about any topic you are interested in.”

Alongside studying Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Zaynah has worked with and supported companies like CIBC, TD, Deloitte, and Microsoft. Zaynah has spoken at leading conferences globally, including in Dubai, Poland, Toronto, San Francisco, and more. She is also a leading advocate for women and girls in technology and inspires girls to pursue science or tech related fields.

Her motto is to encourage other young girls to “explore different topics within science and technology, gain as much breadth and depth as you can, and have fun with it!”



Improving the quality of life

Sofia Hamirally, from Portugal, is a virologist and works in the industry-leading biopharmaceutical regulation intelligence networks. After reading science and genetics in her undergraduate studies, Sofia specialised in Virology during Doctorate studies at the University of Cambridge in the UK and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard Medical School in the USA.

Sofia
Image

She was inspired by the “discovery of the structure of DNA, the double-helix, which was pioneered by Watson and Crick back in 1953, in Cambridge, UK.”

In her work, Sofia tries to “apply our ethics to the process of scientific discovery and help advance global knowledge through the academic and professional worlds." Her contributions help to ensure that conversations between what is right or wrong in science are carefully considered.

“The study of science and its advancement is unique in that it can shape human progress," she says, citing "the recent medical breakthroughs in the development of vaccines and therapeutics to fight the SARS-COV-2 virus.”

“These are examples of how science can save lives and improve the quality of life for humankind. If you are inspired, passionate and have the drive to contribute to shaping similar progress, come on board!”

https://the.ismaili/global/news/communi ... gh-science
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Sexual crime of women

Women’s sexual crime is not a novelty, although one could say that it is one of the least empirically investigated forensic issues. According to court statistics, women make up about 10% of all convicted people, including about 4% of the total number of convictions for crimes against sexual freedom and morality, as well as 0.3% of the total number of all convicted women.

It is a common belief in the society that a woman can only be a victim of sexual violence and not a perpetrator. Sexual aggression of women is considered a phenomenon that is either non-occurring or rare (Helios, Jedlecka 2017). In addition, it is believed not to cause negative consequences in victims (Beezley-Mrazek, Lynch, Bentovim 1995). One of the myths about sexual aggressiveness of women that is mentioned the most frequently in this context is that a woman does not have the necessary physical strength to force a man to have sexual contact.Another common misconception is that it is always a man who is the initiator of sexual contacts. However, issues such as deception, use of psychoactive agents, intimidation, emotional blackmail or manipulation are ignored. In terms of domestic violence, the issues relating to sexual violence by women against men and against children are also often marginalised. Even if these issues are being tackled, the focus is usually on emotional or economic violence rather than on physical violence. The topic of sexual violence by women is being overlooked.It should also be emphasised that the phenomenon of sexual violence is much wider than raping or forcing unwanted sexual contact. The literature of the subject stresses that, depending on the norms and beliefs in the sexual sphere of a given society, sexual violence can take such forms as:

• making inappropriate remarks about physical appearance,
• looking at a person in an inappropriate and unequivocally erotic manner,
• telling jokes and stories with sexual overtone,
• giving erotic gadgets violating someone’s boundaries as gifts,
• making sexual comments on social media, sending unwanted emails, text messages and multimedia messages clearly indicating their sexual nature.

The whole range of behaviours mentioned above can be, and in fact, is used by both women and men.

Women as the perpetrators of sexual harm to children

The public opinion associates sexual abuse of children mainly with abuse by men. On one hand, this is consistent with research that shows that women account for about 10% (Beezley-Mrazek, Lynch, Bentovim 1995) to 20% (Finkelhor 1988) of all forms of child sexual abuse.On the other hand, it should be emphasised that this phenomenon is extremely complex -not only from a social but also a diagnostic perspective. In the social space, it is clear to see that physical proximity of a woman with a child is not only much more accepted, but it is even expected, which, of course, is connected with the gender roles (Pospiszyl 2004).Due to the lower barrier of physical contact between a woman and a child, it is more diffcult to find a boundary between the so-called “good touch” and “bad touch”. The literature of the subject emphasizes that female sexual violence is more frequently targeted at boys than girls (Russel 1984). This fact is associated with another diffculty, which affects the image of the phenomenon. As a matter of fact, research shows that boys are less likely than girls to reveal this type of experience to the outside world. Estimates by American researchers show that about 10% to 17% of boys experience sexual abuse in childhood (Russel 1984). On this assumption, the researchers indicate that approximately 0.5% - 1.5% of adult women commit sexual offences against children.

Incest relationships are listed in literature as the most common form of female sexual abuse against children. According to the data on the scale of the phenomenon in Poland, on average,there are about ten convictions under Article 201 KK, half of which are committed by women.Contacts between mother and son account for about 10% of all incest relationships, which, as Pospiszyl points out (2004), ranks them third in terms of frequency, right after contacts between siblings and contacts between father and daughter. Incest relationships between mother and daughter account for between 1.5% and 2% of all incest relationships (Pospiszyl 2004).The literature stresses that children between the ages of 7 and 14 (Glaser, Frosh 1995) are most at risk of sexual violence by women. It may be worth considering how the occurrence of sexual behaviour towards children is associated with sexual preference disorders in the formof paedophilia or hebephilia. According to the study by Haitzman et al. (2014), sexual preference disorders in the form of paedophilia are diagnosed in about a third of men convictedunder Article 200 §2 KK (sexual intercourse with a minor). However, there is no informationon the prevalence of sexual preference disorders in women. Most of the research is focused on men as perpetrators of child sexual abuse. According to research, in criminal cases wherewomen participated as a perpetrator or accomplice of child sexual exploitation, no appropri-ate diagnostic tests were carried out to test for sexual dysfunction, while such measures weretaken much more frequently against men (Więcek-Durańska, Durański 2014).

Due to the nature of the sexual abuse committed against a child, the female perpetratoris usually known to the child victim. The women can be the child’s relatives (mother, grand-mother, sister, aunt, etc.) or persons having close contacts with its family, e.g. family friend,babysitter. The least common offences are the acts in which a child is an incidental object anda sexual target. Pospiszyl lists the characteristic types of women who sexually harm children.The rst type is women who are married, often raising children alone, without the presence and significant role of a man in the family, acting as the main caregiver. The second type is passive, unassertive women dependent on their partners, who are frequently accomplices of sexual abuse (Sarrel, Masters 1982). To explain the causes of sexual abuse by women against children, researchers tend to refer to women’s biological predispositions related to maternal functions or to a specific process of socialisation (Pospiszyl 2004). The literature of the subject lists three distinctive models explaining sexual abuse by women. The first model indicates that women’s sexual abuse of children is a specific relationship that they form with a child (Livson 1966). As it is emphasized, that relationship is flawed because of its negative consequences, but it is a certain form of connection (Pospiszyl 2004). One of the causes of child sexual abuse by women is altruism aimed at, among other things, serving a protective function, e.g. introducing a boy to the role of an adult, breaking down the boy’s fears related to his gender identity or discharging the mental tension associated with an experience of severe stress. In the second model, women usually accompany their partner in the infliction of harm to the child. The perpetrators of abuse are, as studies have shown, passive women, who are subordinate to their partner, sometimes wanting to make the partner stay with them at all costs. It is emphasized that the man is the initiator of sexual behaviour towards a child. The third model concerns women with traits of an anti-social personality, who have trouble controlling their emotions. The child is treated purely instrumentally. Sometimes, sexual abuse can be part of revenge for the harm or losses suffered (Pospiszyl 2004). It is stressed that incidents of child sexual abuse by women are revealed extremely rarely; this occurs most frequently when the accomplice is a man. The act on the part of the woman is revealed somehow by accident.

Women as perpetrators of rape

According to initial estimates, in Poland, women make up about 1% of the total number of sex offenders. As emphasised above, there is no reliable data on the scale of the whole phenomenon. We rely only on statistics on final convictions for sexual offences, i.e. acts under Articles 197-205 of the Polish Penal Code. It should be emphasised that, in addition to the dificulties discussed earlier with regard to verifying whether certain behaviours of women constitute sexual abuse, the picture of all sexual crime, not only by women but also by men,is influenced by the so-called dark figure of crime. Especially with regard to sexual offences,it is estimated that this number is very high. The following can be listed as reasons for not reporting sexual offences to law enforcement authorities: shame, guilt, fear of the perpetrator or others, disbelief that the offender will be punished, reluctance to participate in lengthy procedures, reluctance to participate in interrogation, and in cases where the perpetrator of the act is a woman - shame, fear of exposure to ridicule.

In my research (Więcek-Durańska 2019), the characteristic feature of rape committed by women is the non-sexual motive of action. One the most common motives for women’s actions was found to be revenge. Acts of rape were often a form of retaliation, either on the victim herself or on another person with whom the victim was in close relations (Więcek-Durańska2019).

Another characteristic feature of rape by women is also the manner in which they act.According to the results of file studies, all rapes with particular cruelty were committed by women acting in a group, mainly with other men. A characteristic feature of rapes committed by women was their use of various objects to imitate sexual intercourse. It is worth pointing out here that acts committed by men also involve the use of dangerous tools (as many as 70%,as the research indicates) (Więcek-Durańska, Durański 2014), however, in most of these cases the objects are not used to imitate sexual intercourse (penetration of the body), but rather to break the resistance of the victim.

When analysing women’s sexual crime, it is worth bringing up the issue of specialist examinations to which female sexual offenders are subjected. According to research, female perpetrators of rape are far less likely to undergo specialist psychological, sexological or psychiatric examinations for possible disorders than male perpetrators are. In-depth diagnosis is usually carried out with regard to women who are intellectually disabled, and the examinationis aimed at verifying the perpetrator’s sanity. However, it can be assumed that the differences observed are not due to the actual differences in the sex of the perpetrators themselves, but rather due to other factors characterising the perpetrators’ actions. Here, women were more likely to be punished for the first time, and in the case of those who had had criminal experience before, it would rarely be for offences against sexual freedom.

https://www.academia.edu/50085965/Sexua ... card=title
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Tools to Connect to Your Inner Power

Dear Karim,

Louise Hay was a true pioneer in self-love and self-empowerment, teaching us how to love and accept ourselves more and rise above self-imposed limitations.

With one of her most groundbreaking books, Empowering Women: Every Woman’s Guide to Successful Living , she taught countless women to dream big and claim their power. The book was released in 1999, followed by an international event tour where Louise spread her message.

And now, we are thrilled to bring you Embrace Your Feminine Power https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/eyfp- ... M0NjQyMwS2, an online event inspired by Louise’s legacy. On this 4-day journey, you’ll get the tools you need to boost your self-esteem, break through limiting beliefs, and become a more joyful and empowered YOU.

Join Now Free https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/eyfp- ... M0NjQyMwS2

Embrace Your Feminine Power brings together 22 world-renowned teachers who are unparalleled experts in their field and have been featured in the world’s most influential media. Listen to lessons from Louise Hay, Iyanla Vanzant, Rebecca Campbell, Mandy Morris, Kris Carr, Dr. Deborah Egerton, Mel Robbins, and many others.

Here is just a taste of what you’ll learn:
- Actionable strategies to start putting yourself first
- How radical self-care leads you back to your power
- Simple techniques to break through your self-imposed limitations
- How to overcome people-pleasing and a fear of judgment
- Why you don’t need to hide your feminine self to find success
- How to rebalance your energies to manifest successfully
… and so much more.

The event starts on International Women’s Day—March 8—but there’s no need to wait until then to get started! The moment you sign up, you’ll get access to six exclusive lessons from Louise Hay, Suze Orman, Abiola Abrams, Victoria Labalme, Danette May, and Kelly McDaniel.

Take Me to the Early Access Lessons »https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/eyfp- ... M0NjQyMwS2

As Louise always encouraged, now is the time to move past your fears, discover and celebrate your true self, and create your most fulfilling life. We hope you’ll join us for this exciting event!

Save My Spot Now »https://www.discover.hayhouse.com/eyfp- ... M0NjQyMwS2

Wishing You the Best,
Your Friends at Hay House
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

International Women’s Day

As we celebrate International Women's Day this year, let us reflect on how we can #BreakTheBias.


Image

International Women's Day is observed annually on March 8 and is a global day to recognize the social, economic, cultural, artistic and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action to accelerate gender equality.

Throughout history, Muslim women have contributed to all walks of life, from significant leadership positions as heads of state in Muslim societies, in western governments, to Nobel prize winners. Despite these contributions, women’s inequality has been a common feature of most human societies. This includes the disproportionate role often played by women in family and community life, in many societies. The economic – and social - importance of these contributions is often understated and discounted.

In the Holy Qur’an, men and women are presented as being created equally by Allah. However, in their lived experiences, many Muslim women, as across some other traditions, have been marginalized or silenced by patriarchal cultures and the interpretations of male religious leaders who under-appreciated women’s contributions.

Under the leadership of Mawlana Hazar Imam, the Aga Khan Development Network seeks to empower women in various ways. Small business loans help women to start and grow their businesses. Support programs aim to increase access to education for girls and to keep them in school. Nursing and midwifery programs have provided higher education and jobs for thousands of women.

In 2019, on receiving the Huffington Award, Princess Zahra Aga Khan noted: “There has always been this ethos of putting a lot of emphasis on the role of women in society and giving those women the tools and the wherewithal to be educated mothers and leaders of their societies.

On International Women’s Day, let us reflect on how we can contribute to building awareness around women’s issues and position in society. We can support women-owned businesses, advocate for gender equality in the workplace, encourage greater female representation in leadership, and publicly recognize women’s contributions.

Watch the Virtual International Women's Day Gala from 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jawvjnz ... e=emb_logo

https://iicanada.org/articles/international-womens-day
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Gul Noori - Breaking Taboos: Women in Search & Rescue - International Women's Day 2022

Image

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=povrGrK3sFA

Breaking Taboos: Meet the women of northern #Pakistan working as search and rescue volunteers with #AKAH. From scaling mountains to wearing dungarees, Gul Noori has spent 22 years breaking barriers for women in northern Pakistan as a search/rescue volunteer. #IWD #BreakTheBias #FocusHumanitarianAssistance @akdn

********
Aga Khan Development Network | Breaking the Bias | International Women's Day 2022

Image

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4criJB-m3Q

The #AKDN is committed to raising the competence and confidence of women and changing the mindsets of communities so that women and girls are not overlooked or forgotten. Watch this 1-minute video and join us as we #breakthebias to create a fairer world for our daughters and sons.
Last edited by kmaherali on Mon Mar 07, 2022 4:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Aga Khan Development Network | Breaking the Bias | Teaser 3

Image

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUS5HMqrnmI

#breakthebias: Globally, women make up less than a quarter of the persons heard, read about or seen in the media. #internationalwomensday2022

******
Aga Khan Development Network | Breaking the Bias | Teaser 4[/img]

Image

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgbrxqAps2Q

#breakthebias: “If every child could grow up with a father and a mother, both of whom love and care for the child, ours would be a much better world.” – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Hillary Clinton: Madeleine Albright Warned Us, and She Was Right

Image

By Hillary Clinton

Mrs. Clinton was the U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. She worked closely through the years with Madeleine Albright, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of state during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

March 25, 2022
Late one night in 1995, in a cramped airplane cabin high over the Pacific, Madeleine Albright put down a draft of a speech I was set to deliver in Beijing at the upcoming United Nations conference on women, fixed me with the firm stare that had made fearsome dictators shudder, and asked what I was really trying to accomplish with this address.

“I want to push the envelope as far as I can,” I replied. “Then do it,” she said. She proceeded to tell me how I could sharpen the speech’s argument that women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.

That was Madeleine, always cutting right to the heart of the matter with clarity and courage. She pushed the envelope her entire life. She did it on behalf of women and girls, shattering the glass ceiling of diplomacy as the first woman to serve as secretary of state and calling out atrocities against women all over the world. She did it for the country that took her in as a child fleeing tyranny in Europe, championing the United States as an indispensable nation and the leader of the free world. She never stopped pushing the envelope for freedom and democracy, including cajoling sometimes skeptical generals and diplomats to see human rights as a national security imperative.

For Bill and me and her many friends all over the world, Madeleine’s passing is a painful personal loss. She was irrepressible: wickedly funny, stylish and always game for adventure and fun. I’ll never forget how excited she was to walk me through the streets of her native Prague and show me the yellow house where she lived as a girl. We couldn’t stop laughing when an unexpected rainstorm blew our umbrellas inside out, and couldn’t stop smiling when the captivating playwright and dissident turned president Václav Havel charmed us over dinner. Madeleine was 10 years ahead of me at Wellesley, and for decades we used to address and sign our notes to each other “Dear ’59” and “Love, ’69.”

Madeleine’s death is also a great loss for our country and for the cause of democracy at a time when it is under serious and sustained threat around the world and here at home. Now more than ever, we could use Madeleine’s vital voice, her cleareyed view of a dangerous world and her unstinting faith in both the unique power of the American idea and the universal appeal of freedom and democracy. We can honor her memory by heeding her wisdom.

Stand up to bullies and dictators

In the 1990s, when my husband named Madeleine U.N. ambassador and then secretary of state, she went toe-to-toe with the blood-soaked Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. She helped marshal American power and the NATO alliance to end the brutal war in Bosnia and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. She saw the chronically underestimated Russian president Vladimir Putin for what he is: a vicious autocrat intent on reclaiming Russia’s lost empire and a committed foe of democracy everywhere. In a prescient column in The Times published Feb. 23, she warned that an invasion of Ukraine would be “a historic error” that would leave Russia “diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.” As happened so often, the man with the guns was wrong and Madeleine was right.

Image
Madeleine Albright talking to Kim Jong-Il, center, in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 2000.Credit...Andrew Wong/AFP/Getty Images

She was a woman of action, especially when facing injustice. Madeleine understood that American power is the only thing standing between the rules-based global order and the rule of the sword. That did not mean she was ever quick or casual about the use of force, even for the right cause. Madeleine was a diplomat’s diplomat, ready to talk to even the most odious adversary to advance the prospects of peace. In 2000, she was the first secretary of state to travel to North Korea, where she spent 12 hours negotiating with the dictator Kim Jong-il. But, as she often said, her crucial historical frame of reference was Munich, not Vietnam, so she had a deep appreciation for the risks of inaction. Today, with a rising tide of authoritarianism threatening democracy not just in Ukraine but all over the world, that is a lesson worth remembering.

NATO and U.S. alliances are the cornerstone of world peace

As secretary of state, Madeleine helped my husband welcome Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO after the end of the Cold War. Years later, I asked her to head up an international commission for the Obama administration to redefine NATO’s mission for the 21st century. Having experienced Europe’s historic traumas firsthand, she understood that the security provided by NATO was the key to keeping the continent free, peaceful and undivided. She saw it as a political alliance, not just a military pact, cementing democracy in countries that had only recently freed themselves from authoritarianism.

Madeleine rejected the criticism, renewed recently, that NATO’s expansion needlessly provoked Russia and is to blame for its invasion of Ukraine. As the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin has noted, that argument ignores Russia’s centuries-long efforts to dominate its neighbors. Madeleine would be quick to add that it also erases the aspirations and autonomy of the former Soviet bloc countries that threw off their chains, built fragile democracies and rightly worried about Russian revanchism. She would encourage us to listen to the insights of leaders like our friend Mr. Havel, who said the message of NATO expansion is that “Europe is no longer, and must never again be, divided over the heads of its people and against their will into any spheres of interest or influence.”

Make no mistake, if NATO had not expanded, Mr. Putin would be menacing not just Ukraine but the Baltic States and likely all of Eastern Europe. As the historian and journalist Anne Applebaum recently argued, “The expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only truly successful, piece of American foreign policy of the last 30 years.”


Image
Madeleine Albright, right, with Hillary and Bill Clinton at the funeral for Václav Havel, the former Czech president, in 2011.Credit...Michal Cizek/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Madeleine also strongly disagreed with Donald Trump’s approach of treating America’s alliances as a protection racket where our partners must pay tribute or fend for themselves. She knew that U.S. alliances — especially with other democracies — are a military, diplomatic and economic asset that neither Russia nor China can match, despite their best efforts, and are crucial for our own national security.

Attacks on democracy at home play into the hands of dictators abroad

They make it harder for the United States and our allies to champion human rights and the rule of law. In her searing 2018 book, “Fascism: A Warning,” Madeleine described Mr. Trump as the first U.S. president in the modern era “whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.” She observed that his assault on democratic norms and institutions was “catnip” for autocrats like Mr. Putin. After the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn a free and fair election, Madeleine imagined Abraham Lincoln weeping. “My family came to America after fleeing a coup, so I know that freedom is fragile,” she wrote. “But I never thought I would see such an assault on democracy be cheered on from the Oval Office.” With the Republican Party recently declaring the insurrection and events that led to it to be “legitimate political discourse,” and some of the party’s most powerful media allies pushing Kremlin talking points on Fox News and elsewhere, it’s clear that the threat to our democracy that so alarmed Madeleine remains an urgent crisis.

The fundamental truth that Madeleine understood and that informed her views on all these challenges is that America’s strength flows not just from our military or economic might but from our core values. Back in 1995, Madeleine told me a story that still inspires me. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, she visited parts of the Czech Republic that had been liberated by American troops in 1945. Many people waved American flags as she passed, and to her surprise, some had just 48 stars. They had to be decades old. It turned out that American G.I.s had handed out the flags a half-century earlier. Czech families said they had kept them hidden all through the years of Soviet domination, passing them down from generation to generation as the embodiment of their hope for a better, freer future.

Madeleine knew exactly what that meant. Even at the end of her life, she treasured her first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, sailing into New York Harbor in 1948 as an 11-year-old refugee on a ship called the S.S. America. She would have been thrilled by President Biden’s announcement on Thursday that the United States will welcome up to 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine, and she would encourage us to do more to respond to this unfolding humanitarian nightmare. She would warn, as she did in her book, about the “self-centered moral numbness that allows Fascism to thrive,” and urge us to keep pushing the envelope for freedom, human rights and democracy. We should listen.

Hillary Clinton was the U.S. secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Women, Do We Need an Intervention?

There have been a lot of jokes and memes about pandemic drinking by women, but the fact is that in the past two decades, women have often turned to alcohol more than they did in the past.

Yes, the pandemic has compounded the problem. A study in JAMA Network Open in 2020 found that the days in which women drank excessively (defined as four or more drinks in a few hours) increased by 41 percent during lockdown. Another report, from RTI International for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, said that mothers with children under 5 increased their drinking by more than 300 percent during the pandemic.

But the pattern of increased alcohol abuse by women appears to have preceded the pandemic. In fact, I was one of them. I found myself drinking more than I did before becoming a mother of two children. Luckily, I was able to recognize the problem and recently celebrated one year of sobriety.

Women need an intervention. Our physical and mental health is suffering because of drinking. We have to address the reality of excessive alcohol consumption by women, and more women need to speak out about it — and seek help.

From 2001 to 2013, there was a 58 percent increase in women’s heavy drinking and an 84 percent increase in alcohol-use disorder. It has an effect on every part of life — from parenting to health care to the economy.

We often assume that men are more typically the ones with a drinking problem. And men do generally drink more — but the gender gap is narrowing. One study reported that from 2006 to 2014, alcohol-related visits to the emergency room increased by 70 percent for women and 58 percent for men. Another found that from 2009 to 2015, the prevalence of women’s cirrhosis related to alcohol rose 50 percent, while men’s increased 30 percent.

American alcohol consumption began to rise generally in the 1990s, with women posting some of the highest increases. It’s not entirely clear why that happened.

One reason is that alcohol producers saw a lucrative target. Since up to 85 percent of consumer purchases are made by women, women-focused marketing was a smart move. It was also the late 1990s when the television show “Sex and the City” appeared, making cosmopolitans with friends a symbol of fun and sophistication.

What’s more, a 2018 study found that women paid up to 13 percent more for the same products as men if they were rebranded as feminine. Products were created specifically for women’s consumption, such as Chick Beer and Johnnie Walker’s Jane Walker. As sales soared, so did new offerings: Skinnygirl Margarita, birthday-cake-flavored Smirnoff vodka, Mommy’s Time Out wine. The trend continued with the unmatched popularity of White Claw and Truly hard seltzers, low-calorie drinks with fruity flavors. From May 2020 to May 2021 alone, hard seltzer producers claimed $4.5 billion in sales.

Marketing teams have also realized that portraying alcohol as a reward or relaxation tool for tired mothers can be an effective strategy. The #WineMom trend was born, and with it came play-date happy hours, travel coffee mugs spiked with vodka and the normalization of alcohol to deal with all things parenting.

Last year, Tropicana introduced a marketing campaign called “Take a Mimoment,” which showcased hidden mini-fridges around the house where parents could sneak a mimosa made with Tropicana juice. Sobriety advocates quickly called the brand on it — after all, hiding drinks generally signals a drinking problem. Tropicana apologized, and celebrities including Molly Sims and Gabrielle Union took down their Instagram posts promoting the Tropicana mimosa.

But it seems that we are still struggling with drinking. In recent years, there’s been a flood of articles about “mommy wine culture” and alcohol abuse in women. The former ABC News anchor Elizabeth Vargas published a memoir about her addiction. Others have made careers of their sobriety, like the writer Holly Whitaker, whose book “Quit Like a Woman” soared in sales after the model Chrissy Teigen said that it persuaded her to quit drinking.

Millennials reportedly drink less than other age cohorts, but health statistics overall aren’t improving. From 1999 to 2017, alcohol-related deaths among women rose by 85 percent. That’s a mind-boggling number, and I, like many others, hope alcohol will one day follow the path of cigarettes — now a social ill slapped with bold warning labels.

When I began thinking about sobriety, I knew alcohol could be bad for the liver, but was disturbed to learn that it also attacks the immune system and is connected with over 60 different diseases. With today’s obsession with “clean” eating and “nontoxic” foods, it’s startling that so many are fine with pouring ethanol — a literal toxic substance — into their bodies regularly. Recently, the American Cancer Society changed its recommended alcohol intake to zero because of its close association with cancer.

Once you know the truth about alcohol’s effect on the body, you can’t unknow it — especially if you have family members who have struggled with alcohol abuse. I thought of my grandfather, who died of liver disease, and my mother-in-law, whose life (and subsequently the lives of her children) was destroyed because of alcohol. I thought of nights I had put my children to bed while tipsy and how they noticed the change in my voice when I drank. I thought of arguments with my husband, insomnia, dry mouth, headaches and regret.

I typed “Do I have a drinking problem?” into a search engine and found that many other people were asking the same or a similar question. The actions I took after that led me to today and over a year of sobriety.

I was helped in part by the writer Laura McKowen’s company, the Luckiest Club, which offers several meetings a day via video, each often including hundreds of people trying to get and stay sober. For women specifically, several options exist (many charge fees), among them Sober Sis, Sober Mom Squad and Women for Sobriety. Tempest is another one to consider. By searching hashtags like #SoberLiving and #SoberMovement, you’ll find supportive communities and recovery coaches available to help.

But the recovery community can’t do it alone. A public health issue this large needs corporate and governmental allies to help spread awareness and work to reduce the shame associated with addiction and sobriety.

I’m thankful I got the courage to face my alcohol dependence. I’m hopeful that many other women in America will end their state of denial. Their lives depend on it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Jackson Confirmed as First Black Woman to Sit on Supreme Court

The vote was a bipartisan rejection of Republican attempts to paint her as a liberal extremist who had coddled criminals.


Image

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, making her the first Black woman to be elevated to the pinnacle of the judicial branch in what her supporters hailed as a needed step toward bringing new diversity and life experience to the court.

Overcoming a concerted effort by Republicans to sully her record and derail her nomination, Judge Jackson was confirmed on a 53-to-47 vote, with three Republicans joining all 50 members of the Democratic caucus in backing her.

The vote was a rejection of Republican attempts to paint her as a liberal extremist who had coddled criminals. Dismissing those portrayals as distorted and offensive, Judge Jackson’s backers saw the confirmation as an uplifting occasion for the Senate and a mark of how far the country had come.

Judge Jackson, whose parents attended segregated schools, has two degrees from Harvard University and, at 51, is now in line to replace Justice Stephen G. Breyer when he retires at the end of the court’s session this summer, making her a justice in waiting.

“Even in the darkest times, there are bright lights,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said on the Senate floor. “Today is one of the brightest lights. Let us hope it’s a metaphor, an indication of many bright lights to come.”

He added, “How many millions of kids in generations past could have benefited from such a role model?”

At the Capitol, the galleries, closed for much of the pandemic, were filled with supporters on hand to witness the historic vote. The chamber erupted in cheers, with senators, staff and visitors all jumping to their feet for a lengthy standing ovation, when the vote was announced.

“After weeks and weeks of racist, misogynistic and stomach-churning attacks, we cannot wait to finally call her Justice Jackson,” said Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., describing the moment as one of “enormous consequence to our nation and to history.”

Not everyone shared in the joy of the day. As applause echoed from the marbled walls, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, turned his back and slowly walked out, as did most of the few Republicans remaining on the floor, leaving half of the chamber empty as the other half celebrated in a stark reflection of the partisan divide.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/us/p ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Tanzania’s First Female President Wants to Bring Her Nation in From the Cold

Post by kmaherali »

Samia Suluhu Hassan became the only female head of government in Africa when her predecessor suddenly died. She is setting a new course.

Image

DODOMA, Tanzania — Shortly before midnight on a spring night last year, Samia Suluhu Hassan, then Tanzania’s first female vice president, appeared on television to announce to a shocked nation that the president was dead.

President John Magufuli, an autocrat known as The Bulldozer, had denied that coronavirus existed in his country, rejected Covid vaccines and died after a weekslong absence from public view amid unconfirmed reports that he had contracted the virus.

His death catapulted Ms. Hassan to a historic position as Tanzania’s first female president. Known as Mama Samia, she is currently the only female head of government in Africa. On Friday, she met in Washington with a fellow path-breaker, Kamala Harris, the first woman and first woman of color to be vice president of the United States.

Since taking office, Ms. Hassan has set off on a different path than her predecessor: She encouraged Covid vaccinations by publicly taking the shot herself, lifted a ban on pregnant girls in schools and began to amend some Magufuli-era economic regulations to lure back investors.

But her first challenge, Ms. Hassan said in an interview last week at the state house in the capital, Dodoma, was to overcome the notion that a woman could not lead Tanzania.

“Most of the people couldn’t believe that we can have a woman president and she can deliver,” Ms. Hassan said. “The challenge was to create a trust to the people that yes, I can do it.”

Image
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Ms. Hassan has begun to amend some economic regulations to lure back investors.Credit...Malin Fezehai for The New York Times

She said that other African female leaders — including Liberia’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Sahle-Work Zewde, the president (though not head of government) of Ethiopia — quickly came to her support, urging her in a virtual meeting to remain confident, seek counsel and listen to her inner voice.

“They all gave me courage that you can do it,” said Ms. Hassan, who was fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Since ascending to power in March last year, Ms. Hassan has positioned herself as a unifying national figure willing to challenge the establishment and bent on bringing her country in from the cold after five years of isolationism under Mr. Magufuli, who rarely traveled abroad.

Tanzania, a nation of 60 million people that borders eight other countries in eastern, central and southern Africa, was long seen as a bulwark of stability in a region torn by ethnic strife and civil war.

But Ms. Hassan, who is expected to run for president in 2025, takes the helm of a polarized nation with a battered economy and growing unemployment, a slow pace of vaccine deployment and a growing clamor for constitutional overhauls.


Image
Members of the Tanzania People’s Defense Force during an independence day parade in December in Dar es Salaam.
Members of the Tanzania People’s Defense Force during an independence day parade in December in Dar es Salaam.Credit...Ericky Boniphace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In addition to meeting American officials during her trip to the United States, she is also set to court investors, seek assistance in improving public health partnerships and promote Tanzania as a vibrant tourist destination.

In Washington, one issue that Ms. Hassan is likely to face is the war in Ukraine. Tanzania was among the African nations that abstained from the United Nations vote condemning the war — a move Ms. Hassan said was in line with Tanzania’s longstanding position of nonalignment.

Pushed on this, she said that in “Tanzania, we don’t know why they are fighting,” adding that Russia and Ukraine should sit down to talk. “The world has to convince Putin not to fight,” she said

Ms. Hassan, 62, was born in the Zanzibar archipelago off the coast of mainland Tanzania to a stay-at-home mother and schoolteacher father. After high school, she completed bachelor’s and postgraduate degrees in economics and public administration in schools in Tanzania and Britain. She later worked with the World Food Program and held positions in various nongovernmental organizations in Zanzibar.

Image

Ms. Hassan and Vice President Kamala Harris meeting in Washington on Friday.Credit...Drew Angerer/Getty Images
But at the turn of the century, she decided to try her hand in government.

A member of the governing Chama Cha Mapinduzi party — or Party of the Revolution — since the late 1980s, she was elected as a lawmaker in Zanzibar in 2000 before joining the national Parliament in 2010. Ms. Hassan, who sits in the party’s central committee, quickly went up the ranks, becoming a minister in the vice president’s office and then rising to the vice presidency in 2015. Ms. Hassan is married to Hafidh Ameir Hafidh, a former agriculture lecturer, with whom she has three sons and one daughter.

Ms. Hassan, who is soft-spoken and comes across as reserved, said that as vice president, it was “tough” working with Mr. Magufuli at times, and that she argued with him on several issues, including his Covid denialism. She rebutted the idea that he had succumbed to Covid and said he had died of heart complications.

As president, she said, her main priority was to revive the economy, build thousands of schools and health clinics, extend clean water and electricity to rural areas and complete key infrastructure projects — including a railway line and a major hydropower plant. She said that more than 250 new businesses had already been registered in the country last year.

Yet concerns have persisted about the pace of change under her government.

Image
During her visit to the United States, Ms. Hassan is set to court investors and promote Tanzania as a <br />vibrant tourist destination.
During her visit to the United States, Ms. Hassan is set to court investors and promote Tanzania as a
vibrant tourist destination.Credit...Malin Fezehai for The New York Times

Over the past year, activists were abducted, two newspapers were temporarily suspended by the government and the main opposition leader, Freeman Mbowe, was jailed for several months on terrorism-related charges before his release. Political rallies outside elections have been banned in the country since 2016, when the government accused the opposition of wanting to use them to cause mass civil disobedience. Activists also questioned whether Ms. Hassan was committed to reviewing the constitution, which grants vast powers to the executive and was adopted in 1977, when the country was still a one-party state.

Ms. Hassan said she wanted to focus on fixing the economy before turning to the “huge” and “costly” endeavor of changing the constitution. She said she created a task force from within the political parties council to make recommendations on changes, including lifting the ban on political rallies. She added that she was intent on leveling the playing field, even if it cost her the presidency in the next elections.

She has also struck a conciliatory note with the political opposition and civil society.

On a recent morning, she arrived at a packed hall in the capital to preside over a conference discussing how to improve the democratic space in the country. Sitting by her side onstage was one of the leaders of the country’s main opposition parties, who under her predecessor had been arrested and found guilty of sedition, and whose fellow party members were beaten, tear-gassed and denied the chance to hold rallies.

“Things have changed,” Zitto Kabwe, the opposition leader, said in an interview the next day. “We started to breathe some fresh air from the day the new president took office.”


Image
Simon Mkina was the publisher and editor in chief of Mawio, a weekly investigative newspaper that was banned under President John Magufuli. Ms. Hassan lifted the ban on the newspaper.
Simon Mkina was the publisher and editor in chief of Mawio, a weekly investigative newspaper that was banned under President John Magufuli. Ms. Hassan lifted the ban on the newspaper. Credit...Malin Fezehai for The New York Times

But while he would like to see the political changes put in place quickly, Mr. Kabwe said he also understood Ms. Hassan’s predilection for incremental change. “She’s a leader who wants consensus, and consensus takes time,” he said.

Last year, Ms. Hassan’s government lifted bans on four newspapers, but she has yet to change some of the restrictive laws that have been used to undermine media freedom.

Simon Mkina, the publisher and editor in chief of Mawio, a weekly investigative newspaper that she reinstated, said she should overhaul media laws so that future leaders do not abuse them. “She must take action,” he said.


With three more years before the next election, Ms. Hassan has her work cut out for her.

Fatma Karume, a prominent Tanzanian lawyer who was disbarred and had her office bombed for challenging Mr. Magufuli’s government, said Ms. Hassan has the chance to restore Tanzanians’ faith in democracy and transform the country.

“She could leave behind a legacy that few other presidents have managed,” Ms. Karume said in an interview at her home in the port city of Dar es Salaam. “And imagine doing that as a result of a historical accident. It will be amazing.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/worl ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

The 17th-Century Judge at the Heart of Today’s Women’s Rights Rulings

Post by kmaherali »

Both in India and in the Roe v. Wade draft ruling roiling the United States, Lord Matthew Hale — an English judge who wrote that women were contractually obligated to husbands — still looms large.

Image
The 17th-century English jurist Lord Matthew Hale was cited in a recent Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.Credit...Universal History Archive, via Getty Images

Reporting trips, for me, are always an exercise in finding similarities among differences: the ribbons of shared dilemmas, conflicts and social changes that link people together, no matter their nation.

I spent most of the past two weeks in India, where that effort turned out to be more straightforward than expected. I was there working on a long-term project about young women struggling to strike a balance between their ambitions for new opportunities in a modernizing economy, and the constraints of a patriarchal system that expects them to remain at home, confined to the private sphere and governed first by their families, and then by their husbands and in-laws.

Many of their struggles seemed like more extreme versions of the dilemmas facing women around the world, including in the United States, where I grew up, and the United Kingdom, where I live now.

But somewhat unexpectedly there was also a far more direct link, which became clear when opinions by prominent judges in both countries became public within days of each other, both drawing on reasoning from the same man: Lord Matthew Hale, a 17th-century English jurist.

Hundreds of years ago, his decisions about women’s rights within marriage and over their own bodies — or, more precisely, his decisions that those rights ought to be constrained so that they wouldn’t encroach on men’s rights too much — became part of British common law, and so by extension the common law of the United States, India and other British colonies.

In the United States, Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade cited Hale eight times. In India, an opinion from the Delhi High Court refused to criminalize spousal rape, upholding a legal exception that Hale had codified in a treatise in the 1600s. (The Indian court split, with another judge voting to end the exception. The petitioners plan to appeal the decision.)

“It’s so startling that within 10 days of each other, we have the leaked Alito decision and the decision on marital rape,” said Karuna Nundy, a lawyer who represented the petitioners in the Indian case. “Both traced back to a colonial-era misogyny that the constitutions of India and the United States — that guarantee individual rights, the individual rights to privacy of the body, to bodily integrity, to free sexual expression — have overridden.”

Or at least seemed, on paper and in other decisions, to have overridden. But both cases have shown how that kind of reasoning, once embedded not just within court judgments but also in social norms and practices that have their own collective momentum and power, can persist, even in the face of apparent progress.

Image
Women demonstrating to demand more rights on International Women's Day in March in Amritsar, India.Credit...Narinder Nanu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The past is not dead: legal edition

A central tenet of Hale’s legal philosophy was that giving women legally enforceable rights over their own bodies was a threat to men’s freedom.

That comes through clearly in his famous description of rape as “an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.” That became the basis for centuries of jurisprudence and jury instructions that treated the moral character of rape victims as the paramount concern in rape cases, and often presumed that they were lying if they could not produce corroborating witnesses or other outside evidence for their claims.

Hale also wrote in his influential common-law treatise that marital rape could not be a crime because marriage itself constituted irrevocable consent to sex — but only for the wife. “For by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract,” he wrote, “the wife hath given herself up in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract.” That belief was an outgrowth of the doctrine of coverture, which treated a married woman’s rights as “covered” by her husband’s. Her property became his, and she could not bring legal actions in her own right. The family, in this view, was a private sphere in which the husband was essentially the sovereign, and the wife could not appeal to the state for protection.

So far, so 17th century. Except that in common law systems, judicial opinions become binding the same way written laws do, so many of Hale’s beliefs didn’t stay in the past. Some are thankfully now defunct: We no longer hold witch trials, for instance. But his views on rape, marriage and abortion, enshrined in legal opinions, became part of Britain’s legal system, and then those of its colonies. And to say they have had global staying power there would be an understatement.

In the United Kingdom, marital rape was not criminalized until 1991. In the United States, it took until 1993 for it to be a crime in all 50 states. In India, it is still not criminalized at all.

Just two weeks ago, in the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, Justice Alito cited Hale’s treatise eight times as evidence that abortion was considered a crime at the time the U.S. Constitution was written.

And last Wednesday in India, the Delhi High Court issued a split verdict in the case challenging the country’s marital rape exception. The Indian government opposed the case in a brief that warned that removing the exception would make rape law “an easy tool for harassing husbands” and could have a “destabilizing effect on the institution of marriage” — ideas that seemed to flow directly out of Hale’s conception of marriage as a zone of male control.

One judge of the two-judge panel agreed, writing that it would be “antithetical to the very institution of marriage” for a husband to be regarded as a rapist — even if he compels his wife, repeatedly, to have sex without her consent.

Image
Abortion rights activists at the Washington Monument before marching to the Supreme Court this month.Credit...Jose Luis Magana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The wiring of the patriarchy

But the common law is just the procedural mechanism by which these views became and remained law. The bigger story here is a political one.

In colonial India, allowing men control over the private sphere became part of an uneasy détente between the colonial authorities and Hindu nationalists who focused on the family as a zone that should be protected from foreign authority, Tanika Sarkar, an Indian historian of law and women’s rights, wrote in a famous 1993 article. (She also pointed out that it probably held some appeal for male colonial administrators who were uncomfortable with even just the modest progress that British women had won at home.)

In the United States, as numerous legal scholars have written, treating the family as a “private” sphere, protected against state interference, became a shield for male violence, including domestic abuse and spousal rape.

And just as protecting the hierarchy of male power became intertwined with nationalist politics in India, in the United States, traditional gender roles became a central element of southern states’ justification for white supremacy, including the Jim Crow laws.

“To justify and rationalize the brutality over Black men, they created this faux chivalry, and this supposed threat that white women had to be protected from,” said Angie Maxwell, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas. Protecting traditional gender roles thus became linked to protecting the racial hierarchy, she said.

That meant that the Roe v. Wade decision and other feminist reforms created an opportunity for the Republican Party: By framing feminism as a threat to white women’s safety and support, Republicans were able to win support among white women in the South. But that strategy also helped to cement the divide in American politics between a Republican Party dedicated to protecting existing hierarchies, and a Democratic Party that mostly sought more egalitarian reforms.

So while citing Hale looks from one angle like a sober reference to legal history, from another it reads as a more partisan political statement: This is how America has always been, and any change from it is illegitimate.

“The wiring of the patriarchy has been laid bare by the leaked Alito decision, and the fact that it hasn’t changed, even though both countries have constitutions that are meant to protect the individual rights of full citizens since then,” Nundy, the lawyer for the Indian case, told me. “It hasn’t changed from 300 years ago, though both countries gained independence since then. You’d expect that liberty of these sovereign nations would also bring liberty of the human body.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

FIFA Picks First Female Officials for Men’s World Cup

Post by kmaherali »

It is the first time that women, three referees and three assistant referees, were selected to officiate games at the top men’s soccer tournament, which will be held in Qatar this year.
Image

The Qatar World Cup was always going to be full of firsts: the first time it will be played in the Middle East; the first time it will be played in November and December. Now, it may also be the first men’s World Cup tournament in which a game is refereed by a woman.

FIFA on Thursday named three women among the 36 referees chosen to officiate at the event and three more in the group of assistants that will run the line at the monthlong tournament. The most likely candidate among the three to get a starring role is Stéphanie Frappart of France, who has broken a number of barriers in European soccer.

Frappart, who made the list alongside female referees from Rwanda and Japan, has a stellar reputation in European soccer as the first woman to referee men in the Champions League, France’s top division and World Cup qualification games. This month, she refereed the final of the men’s French Cup.

Frappart was also chosen to join the officiating teams at last summer’s European Championship, but her role was limited to that of fourth official, a function on the sideline between the benches of the opposing teams.

In announcing its refereeing choices, FIFA may now look to go one step further. Joining Frappart in the refereeing group are Salima Mukansanga from Rwanda and Yoshimi Yamashita from Japan. They and the other World Cup-bound officials will attend seminars in preparation for the 32-team event.

Image
Salima Mukansanga and all of the other referees selected for the pool of officials at the World Cup will be put through a rigorous physical training program.Credit...Footografiia/EPA, via Shutterstock

“This concludes a long process that began several years ago with the deployment of female referees at FIFA men’s junior and senior tournaments,” said Pierluigi Collina, the chairman of the FIFA referees committee. “In this way, we clearly emphasize that it is quality that counts for us and not gender.”



“I would hope that in the future, the selection of elite women’s match officials for important men’s competitions will be perceived as something normal and no longer as sensational,” he said. “They deserve to be at the FIFA World Cup because they constantly perform at a really high level, and that’s the important factor for us.”


U.S. Soccer and Top Players Agree to Guarantee Equal Pay
May 18, 2022
Still, the environment and focus on female officials can be exacting. Frappart faced abusive messages on social media before and after she officiated the French Cup game, which was decided after a penalty call.

Frappart said before that game that she stayed away from social media and rarely read the press. “Personally, I am focused on what happens on the pitch and don’t pay attention to controversies or discussions about my performances,” she said.

That the opportunity for the first female officials to take part in a World Cup is taking place in a conservative Gulf state like Qatar adds to the intrigue. Some establishments and restaurants in the tiny emirate are separated, with groups of men not allowed to enter areas designated for women or families. Stadiums, though, will be open, without such restrictions.

Image
Yoshimi Yamashita and the other female officials will be working in an emirate in which some establishments limit contact between men and women.Credit...Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters

FIFA has become increasingly innovative when it comes to officiating its multibillion-dollar tournament. The last two editions of the tournament featured goal line technology. At the last one, in Russia, FIFA introduced video assistant refereeing, largely without affecting the flow of the game.

VAR was also used at the last Women’s World Cup, in France, in 2019, but its use, largely because of running costs, is not yet universal in the sport. For that reason, FIFA said the teams at the controls are mainly drawn from Europe and South America.

Choosing referees for the tournament was made harder by the pandemic, and that is also, in part, why FIFA made its announcements earlier than usual. “We want to work even harder with all those who have been appointed for the FIFA World Cup, monitoring them in the next months,” said Collina, a former World Cup final referee. “The message is clear: Don’t rest on your laurels, keep working hard, and prepare yourselves very seriously for the World Cup.”

FIFA is also keen to ensure its officials are able to keep up with players who are fitter than ever. For that, the organization said it would provide each official with a plan to follow to arrive in Qatar in peak form. “Each match official will be carefully monitored in the next months with a final assessment on technical, physical and medical aspects to be made shortly before the World Cup,” Massimo Busacca, FIFA’s director of refereeing, said.

But for all the work, all the focus, a referee’s fate could be defined by one bad call.

“We can’t eliminate all mistakes, but we will do everything we can to reduce them,” Busacca said.

Tariq Panja covers some of the darker corners of the global sports industry. He is also a co-author of “Football’s Secret Trade,” an exposé on soccer’s multibillion-dollar player trading industry. @tariqpanja

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/spor ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

"Show Your Worth": Intention and strategy to uplift women leaders

Post by kmaherali »

Image
Shelmina meets Mawlana Hazar Imam at the UN Global Leadership event in New York in 2017, as a board member of the Girl Up organization.

A former IBM executive’s new book encourages women to harness their power to propel them to success.

In the self-help sections of bookstores, titles such as James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” or Stephen Covey’s, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” often line the shelves. Seldom do we see publications written by women of color who are immigrants from East Africa, single mothers, and members of the Ismaili community.

This will soon change with the June release of global empowerment speaker and former IBM Vice President, Shelmina Babai Abji’s own book: “Show Your Worth: 8 Intentional Strategies for Women to Emerge as Leaders at Work.”

Growing up in Mwanza, Tanzania, Shelmina came from humble beginnings. She and her three siblings shared a bedroom in their apartment, and her mother cooked and sold vitumbuas (fried rice cakes) to supplement her husband’s income and help raise their four children. Though the family did not have a disposable income, Shelmina fondly recalls that she was raised with love, laughter, and delicious food on the table.

“I grew up in a family that had deep values - the Ismaili values of integrity, generosity, respect, trust, seva, and giving back - and really that is what built my foundation,” recalls Shelmina.

Realizing the power and importance of education, another tenet of the Ismaili faith, was a crucial moment in Shelmina’s life. When she was in third grade, she brought home her report card. Printed on thin, peach-colored paper, her grades stood out as mostly D’s and F’s – Shelmina had ranked 27 out of 30 in her class. When her mother saw the report card, she began to cry, tears rolling down her face as she stood over a frying pan of vitumbuas.

Image
Shelmina Babai Abji’s

It was the look of disappointment and sadness on her mother’s face that motivated Shelmina to change her priorities and focus on her studies. This moment not only made her realize the value of education but also the possibility that one can achieve different outcomes when they shift their priorities.

“That was the turning point of my life,” Shelmina writes in chapter one of her book. “I loved my mom so much. It pained me deeply to hurt her, and I promised myself that I’d get good grades to make her happy.”

It was Shelmina’s determination, perseverance, and hard work that enabled her to complete primary and secondary schooling, get a degree in Mathematics in India, and then travel across the world to obtain another Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (CS) from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Driven by her desire to lift herself and her family out of poverty, Shelmina was the first in her family to obtain a college degree. She worked 35-40 hours a week as an undergraduate in addition to carrying a full course load in CS.

Upon graduation, Shelmina realized that her credentials were not enough to earn her a high-paying job. Still on a student visa, she handed out her resume to nearly 300 companies at a New Orleans computer science conference and only received one interview - where she took the job. She remarks:

“I started looking around and saw that no one looked like me,” she described. “No
one talked like me with my accent. Everyone had more experience than I did.
Most of them had Master’s and PhD degrees or went to higher-ranked
universities than I went to. I never really thought about it until I came into my
workplace and started comparing myself to all these people.”

At first, Shelmina undermined her own capabilities and underestimated her worth, which bled into her actions and behaviors at work. With time, she realized that if she didn’t find a way to create unique value - not just value - then she would be out of a job and replaced by an American citizen.

Image
Shelmina Babai Abji’s new book

In her book, talks and articles, TEDx Talk, “Can Fear Advance Your Career?” and https://the.ismaili/usa/what-it-takes-b ... man-leader, Shelmina emphasizes the importance of believing in oneself and overcoming one’s fear of speaking up:

“When we don’t see people that look like us in a room - and also people that don’t
look like us in leadership ranks - we don’t envision ourselves there and we start
short-changing ourselves. I had to realize that what I considered my weakness -
the fact that I was different from everyone - was actually my strength because I
had a unique life journey,” she says.

Shelmina adds, “What I learned is I needed to lean into my uniqueness - I needed to be proud of where I was coming from and the way I solved problems.”

It was these experiences that shaped Shelmina to later coin a term called the” power quotient,” which she also describes in chapter four of her book. Similar to an intelligence or emotional quotient, the power quotient is the power one has to choose, an empowering response to a negative stimulus.

“How you show up and the response you pick to any situation is entirely in your power. No one can make you feel small unless you give them the power. No one can undermine your capabilities unless you give them the power,” Shelmina says. She continues: “The world takes you at your own estimate. If you start undermining your capabilities and underestimating your worth, the world will underestimate your worth.”

Over the years, Shelmina continued to rise in her ranks, serving as a sales executive, then director of sales, and eventually becoming one of the highest-ranking women of color as Vice President at IBM in 2011. In 2014, after reflecting on her career, she decided to leave IBM and focus her time on paying forward, considering how she could have a maximum impact on others.

“When you’re paying it forward, you have to look at - what is it that I can contribute
to the world that’s unique to me? Where I found my passion and my purpose and
what I could uniquely bring to the table [was] sharing my insights on how I moved
ahead,” she comments.

This led Shelmina to become a women’s empowerment speaker, speaking at conferences, corporations and universities, and serving on the advisory board of Girl Up, an organization founded by the United Nations to empower girls globally.

Image
Shelmina giving the Keynote Address at Google, for International Women’s Day, 2017.

It also led her to write a book describing eight Intentional Strategies to help people advance their careers - particularly women of color and also written with Ismailis in mind. Riddled with anecdotes from Shelmina’s life, reflection questions, and intentional exercises, the book serves as a mentor and guide for the reader, while also putting ownership on them to take responsibility for their own success.

At the start of her book, Shelmina challenges readers to define long-term success, considering where the person wants to be in five years. At the same time, she acknowledges that failure does not exist when we push ourselves outside of our comfort zone.

“It’s really important to recognize that we NEED to step outside of our comfort
zone because the outcome doesn’t matter. You will either grow your competence
or you will learn what you are not good at,” she notes. “Either way you will make
a better decision for future success.”

Each remaining chapter of the book focuses on an intentional strategy, chapter two dives deeper into intentional attention, or becoming more deliberate on where one focuses their time and priorities. Chapter three focuses on intentional work-life balance, setting boundaries to nurture and protect one’s inner well-being. Another chapter discusses intentional growth, deliberately seeking ways to grow and learn, step outside one’s comfort zone, build competence, and also reflect upon one’s growth.

Shelmina believes that all of her life experiences, personal hardships, and lessons learned have set her up to write this book. She concludes our conversation thus:

“This book is my Time and Knowledge Nazrana to the women of the world.” My
goal is to help women advance in their careers and rise up the ranks of
leadership so we can have gender equality in leadership roles at every level -
so we can be present in every room where decisions are made.”

For more information about Shelmina’s book, please visit www.shelmina.com.

https://the.ismaili/usa/%E2%80%9Cshow-y ... en-leaders
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Shaken by Grisly Killings of Women, Activists in Africa Demand Change

The continent has the highest rate of gender-related killings of women in the world, according to the United Nations. Activists accuse officials of ignoring the issue and blaming the victims.

Image
A photograph of Grace Wangari Thuiya, a 24-year-old beautician who was killed in Nairobi, Kenya, in January. Her boyfriend assaulted and repeatedly stabbed her, police told her mother.Credit...Natalia Jidovanu for The New York Times

A wave of gruesome killings of women across several African countries in recent weeks has prompted outrage and indignation, triggered a wave of protests and precipitated calls for governments to take decisive action against gender-based violence.

Kenyans were shocked when 31 women were killed in January after they were beaten, strangled or beheaded, activists and police said. In Somalia, a pregnant woman died this month after her husband allegedly set her on fire. In the West African nation of Cameroon, a powerful businessman was arrested in January on accusations, which he has denied, of brutalizing dozens of women.

The upsurge in killings is part of a broader pattern that got worse during economic hard times and pandemic lockdowns, human rights activists say. An estimated 20,000 gender-related killings of women were recorded in Africa in 2022, the highest rate in the world, according to the U.N. Experts believe the true figures are likely higher.

“The problem is the normalization of gender-based violence and the rhetoric that, yes, women are disposable,” said Njeri wa Migwi, the co-founder of Usikimye — Swahili for “Don’t be silent” — a Kenyan nonprofit working with victims of gender-based violence.

Image
People stand in front of an outdoor stage that has a banner over it reading, “Dark Valentine.”
Image
On Valentine’s Day, Kenyans turned out in the capital, Nairobi, for a vigil called “Dark Valentine” to honor the 500 women reportedly killed between 2016 and 2023.Credit...Natalia Jidovanu for The New York Times

The feminist scholar Diana Russell popularized the term femicide — the killing of women or girls because of their gender — to create a category that distinguishes it from other homicides. According to a report by the United Nations, the killings are often carried out by male partners or close family members and are preceded by physical, emotional and sexual abuse.

Critics say that many African leaders, as well as police, ignore or downplay the problem, or even blame victims.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Migwi, the nonprofit co-founder, was leading a training session for girls and women when she was suddenly called to a nearby home in Kayole, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood east of Nairobi.

Inside the dimly lit house, Jacinta Ayuma, a day laborer and mother of two, lay lifeless, bloody bruises visible on her face, neck and left arm. The police said she was killed by her partner. He fled, and they have yet to arrest him. An autopsy showed she died from blunt force trauma that resulted in multiple organ injuries.

Wails of anguish rang in the air as several officers carried the body into a police van using a thin duvet. Three neighbors said they had heard someone screaming for help throughout the night, until about 6 a.m. But they said they did not intervene or call the police because the sounds of beatings and distress were commonplace, and they considered it a private matter.

Image
A somber woman in a white shirt, her face half in light, half in shadow.
Image
Njeri wa Migwi, the co-founder of a Kenyan nonprofit working with victims of gender-based violence, was recently called to the home of a woman found dead with bruises on her face and neck.Credit...Natalia Jidovanu for The New York Times

Ms. Migwi, back in her office nearby, said she had seen too many similar cases. “I am mourning,” she said, her head in her hands. “There’s a helplessness that comes with all of this.”

To coincide with Valentine’s Day, women’s rights campaigners in Kenya organized a vigil they called “Dark Valentine” in the capital to commemorate the women who have been killed. At least 500 women have been victims of femicide in Kenya between 2016 and 2023, according to a recent report by the Africa Data Hub, a group of data organizations working with journalists in several African countries that analyzed cases reported in Kenyan news media.

About 300 people donning black T-shirts waved red roses, lit red candles and observed a minute of silence.

“Why should we have to keep reminding people that women need to be alive,” said Zaha Indimuli, a co-organizer of the event.

Among the women whose name was read at the vigil was Grace Wangari Thuiya, a 24-year-old beautician who was killed in Nairobi in January.

Two days before her death, Ms. Thuiya visited her mother in Murang’a County, about 35 miles northeast of Nairobi. During the visit, her mother, Susan Wairimu Thuiya, said they had spoken about a 20-year-old college student who was dismembered just days before and what seemed like an epidemic of violence against women.

Image
A person at night holding a lit red candle, which lights up a few people’s faces.
Image
At the Dark Valentine vigil to honor femicide victims, in Nairobi on WednesdayCredit...Natalia Jidovanu for The New York Times

Ms. Thuiya cautioned her daughter, whom she described as ambitious and jovial, to be careful in her dating choices.

“Fear was gripping my heart that day,” Ms. Thuiya said of their last encounter.

Two days later, the police called Ms. Thuiya to inform her that her daughter had died after her boyfriend assaulted and repeatedly stabbed her. Ms. Thuiya said her daughter had never revealed that she was seeing someone. The police said they arrested a man in the apartment where Grace Thuiya was killed.

“This is all a bad dream that I want to wake up from,” Ms. Thuiya said.

Ms. Thuiya’s killing, among others, sparked large-scale protests across Kenya in late January. In recent years, anti-femicide protests had broken out in Kenya over the killing of female Olympic athletes, and also in other African nations, including South Africa, Nigeria and Uganda.

Activists say the demonstrations were among the largest nonpolitical protests in Kenya’s history: At least 10,000 women and men crowded the streets of Nairobi alone, with thousands more joining in other cities.

At a time of rising anti-gay sentiments, the protests were also intended to highlight the violence facing nonbinary, queer and transgender women, said Marylize Biubwa, a Kenyan queer activist.

Image
People fill a street during a march in downtown Nairobi. Many wear red and white shirts and hold signs denouncing violence against women.
Image
A protest against femicide last month in Nairobi after a spate of grisly killings. Credit...Daniel Irungu/EPA, via Shutterstock

The movement has generated a backlash, especially online, from men who argue that a woman’s clothing or choices justified abuse. Such comments are disseminated with hashtags like #StopKillingMen and by social media influencers like Andrew Kibe, a men’s rights champion and former radio presenter whose YouTube account was shut down last year for violating the company’s terms of service.

“Shut up,” he said in a recent video, referring to those outraged over the killings of women. “You have no right to have an opinion.”

Activists say they don’t see enough outrage from political, ethnic or religious leaders.

In Kenya, President William Ruto has come under criticism for not personally addressing femicide. A spokesman with his office did not respond to requests for comment. But following the protests, his government vowed to expedite investigations and introduced a toll-free number for the public to report perpetrators.

Still, in Kenya and across Africa, campaigners say more investigators need to be hired, judges need to decide cases more quickly and legislatures should pass laws to punish perpetrators more severely.

Data collection and research on femicide needs to be funded, said Patricia Andago, a researcher at the data firm Odipo Dev.

For now, the killings continue to leave a trail of devastation.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Thuiya, whose 24-year-old daughter was killed in January, sat cuddling her two granddaughters, 5-year-old Keisha and 22-month-old Milan. She said that Keisha believed her mother ascended “to the sky” and asked if she could get a ladder to follow her.

“It was very painful,” Ms. Thuiya said about hearing her granddaughter’s questions. “I just want justice for my daughter. And I want that justice now.”

Image
A downcast older woman sitting in shadow inside a house has her arm around a little girl in pigtails and a pink dress.
Image
Susan Wairimu Thuiya, whose daughter was stabbed to death last month in Kenya, holds her 22-month-old granddaughter, Milan Nduta — one of her daughter’s two young children.Credit...Natalia Jidovanu for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Sexism in Medicine? It’s Not ‘All in Her Head.’

Post by kmaherali »

A new book explores the history of discrimination in women’s health care and how it affects diagnosis and treatment today.

Image

Six years ago, Dr. Elizabeth Comen, a breast cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in Manhattan, held the hand of a patient who was hours from death.

As Dr. Comen leaned in for a final goodbye, she pressed her cheek to her patient’s damp face. “Then she said it,” Dr. Comen recalled.

“‘I’m so sorry for sweating on you.’”

In her two decades as a physician, Dr. Comen has found that women are constantly apologizing to her: for sweating, for asking follow-up questions, for failing to detect their own cancers sooner.

“Women apologize for being sick or seeking care or advocating for themselves,” she said during an interview in her office: “‘I’m so sorry, but I’m in pain. I’m so sorry, this looks disgusting.’”

These experiences in the exam room are part of what drove Dr. Comen to write “All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today.” In it, she traces the roots of women’s tendency to apologize for their ailing or unruly bodies to centuries of diminishment by the medical establishment. It’s a legacy that continues to shape the lives of women patients, she argues.

Today, women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men are and take longer to be diagnosed with heart disease and some cancers; they may be less likely to be offered pain medication; their symptoms are more likely to be written off as anxiety — or, as the book title suggests, as being all in their head.

“The anxious female, the hysterical female, has been a ghost looming and woven through all of medical history,” Dr. Comen said. “It’s a default diagnosis.”

Collectively, she argues in the book, these injustices help to explain why many women report feeling invisible, frustrated or ashamed in doctors’ offices. Shame may be the symptom, but Dr. Comen believes that a deeply misogynistic medical system is the disease.

A History of Exclusion

A mother of three in her mid-40s, Dr. Comen is quick with a camera-ready smile, which has helped to make her a regular in media coverage of breast cancer. She occasionally tears up when discussing her patients.

She once wept on the job in medical school, and a male resident responded by telling her to “pull herself together.”

“I felt like I had to excuse my response,” she said, sitting behind her desk. “And now I cry with patients all the time.”

Her approach has been shaped by decades of experience, as well as by what she learned about the female body’s place in medicine while majoring in the history of science as an undergraduate at Harvard.

“The sense that women’s bodies were not just different but broken is obvious not just in the way doctors spoke of the female anatomy but in the medical vocabulary itself: the female external genitalia was termed ‘pudenda,’ a Latin word that means ‘things to be ashamed of,’” she writes.

In “All in Her Head,” Dr. Comen offers a sweeping look at the ways in which she says modern medicine has disregarded women. For centuries, she writes, early medical authorities believed that women were merely “small men” — though lacking external genitals and comparable mental capacity, ruled by noxious humors and hormones.

For too long, doctors dismissed “what could be legitimate physiological problems as irrelevant, as hormonal, and therefore not important,” said Wendy Kline, a professor of the history of medicine at Purdue University.

And this was the case for white women of means, Dr. Comen writes in the book. If you were a woman of color, or you were poor, you were viewed by medical authorities as even less of an authority on your own body, and thus less worthy of care and compassion.

“For Black women, when we go into a clinical setting, we have to think about racial and gender discrimination,” said Keisha Ray, an associate professor of humanities and bioethics at UTHealth Houston, who studies the effects of institutional racism on Black people’s health. “It tends to be more exaggerated, the lack of compassion and the lack of care that you receive.”

Take heart disease, for example. In the late 19th century, Dr. William Osler, one of the founding fathers of modern medicine, declared that women presenting with what we now know to be symptoms of heart attacks or arrhythmias — including shortness of breath and palpitations — were almost certainly suffering from “pseudo angina,” or false angina, “a collection of neurosis-induced symptoms masquerading as genuine disease,” Dr. Comen writes.

It’s only in the past 25 years that cardiology studies have included women in significant numbers. Today, some heart attack symptoms that are more common in women, such as jaw and back pain, are still described as “atypical” simply because doctors don’t see them as often in men, and are less likely to be taken seriously, even though 44 percent of women will develop heart disease at some point in their life and one in five women will die from it.

“We have used the male model for diagnosis, for treatment, as the gold standard,” said Dr. Jennifer Mieres, a cardiologist with Northwell Health and co-author of the book “Heart Smarter for Women.” This has “led to continued misrepresentation, misdiagnosis, under-recognition of heart attack in women.”

How to Advocate for Yourself

In each chapter of “All in Her Head,” Dr. Comen interviews physicians who are working to improve the system, starting with taking female patients’ complaints seriously — not just chalking up physical symptoms, from chest pain to fatigue to gastrointestinal discomfort, to anxiety until all other causes area ruled out, for example.

Dr. Comen also shares practical tools to better partner with an imperfect system.

First, she writes, it’s essential for all patients to trust their knowledge of their own bodies and advocate for themselves. Before an appointment, ask yourself: What truly concerns you about your body?

“Not what you think you should be worried about,” Dr. Comen writes. “Not what you think your doctor will be able to most comfortably and easily address.”

Next, if you feel anxious about your health or that you’re not being heard, enlist a friend or family member to accompany you to appointments. This person can serve as an advocate and an extra set of eyes and ears.

Finally, if you don’t like your doctor, find a new one. This can be easier said than done, she acknowledged, but a trusting and respectful relationship with your health care provider is every patient’s right.

Danielle Friedman is a journalist in New York and the author of “Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World.” More about Danielle Friedman

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/well ... comen.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

[Free Online Event] You're Invited to The Women of Wisdom Summit

Post by kmaherali »

Dear Karim,

Image

We are thrilled to extend a heartfelt invitation to you for a truly groundbreaking online event: The Women of Wisdom Summit.

This global gathering is set to celebrate and honor the significant contributions, deep wisdom, and extraordinary resilience of spiritual women past and present.

Taking place from March 21-25, The Women of Wisdom Summit https://fleetmaull.krtra.com/c/HGWkBtNKbvlF/ab5j9 promises to be a transformative event, bringing together esteemed Buddhist scholars, thought leaders, and teachers including Jan Willis, Trudy Goodman, Rhonda Magee, Lama Tsultrim Allione, Tami Simon, Kaira Jewel Lingo, Arisika Razak, Cyndi Lee, Lama Döndrup Drolma, Paula Arai, and many more.

Whether you're a seasoned spiritual practitioner, a curious seeker, or simply have a passion for learning and personal growth, this event is designed to inspire, empower, and enrich your spiritual path with a deeper sense of purpose and fulfillment.

The Women of Wisdom Summit honors the invaluable wisdom of the feminine spirit in Buddhist teachings and recognizes trailblazing women teachers, past and present, who shape our personal and collective pathways toward healing, growth, and awakening.

Click here to sign up for free https://fleetmaull.krtra.com/c/HGWkBtNKbvlF/ab5j9

Throughout the summit, you’ll have the chance to:
- Discover your capacity to awaken feminine wisdom and enlightenment through time-tested meditation techniques
- Explore Buddhist practices to nurture personal healing and resilience in the face of burnout, compassion fatigue, or emotional stress
- Cultivate positive seeds from the past, allowing the wisdom, resilience, and strength of your ancestors to flourish in your life
- Nurture deep loving-kindness for your body, and learn to navigate life stages with grace and compassion
- Gain new tools for bringing the spiritual path to your everyday life—at work, in the home, and in the wider world
- Learn how to create caring and diverse spiritual communities that uplift and celebrate women

Plus, you can look forward to three LIVE online events during the summit:

- March 21: Live Opening Keynote, with Trudy Goodman
- March 23: Confidence, Self-Worth, and Self-Compassion on the Path, with Lama Tsultrim Allione
- March 25: Closing Keynote on Mindful Leadership, with Rhonda Magee

Join us as we come together to honor the wisdom of women and pave a path toward a more compassionate, equitable, and awakened world.

Sign up for free today. https://fleetmaull.krtra.com/c/HGWkBtNKbvlF/ab5j9

Hope to see you there!!

The Heart Mind Team
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

‘It’s a Way of Life’: Women Make Their Mark in the Ukrainian Army

Post by kmaherali »

As Ukraine struggles against Russian assaults and its losses mount, there has been a surge of women enlisting, and they are increasingly volunteering for combat roles.

Image
A 31-year-old former lawyer, whose call sign is Witch, is the commander of a Ukrainian artillery platoon from the 241st Brigade.

On the front line just outside Bakhmut, Ukraine, a 32-year-old commander of a Ukrainian artillery platoon rocked to and fro in the passenger seat of a beat-up Lada, as another soldier navigated the car through a thick forest, sometimes mowing down young trees. When they reached their destination, a small village less than two miles from Russian lines, all that was left were destroyed houses, their shattered roofs visible in the moonlight.

The commander, a female soldier who uses the call sign Witch, is a former lawyer who, along with two of her brothers and her mother, joined the military the day after Russia invaded in February 2022. Her first experience in combat was in the outskirts of Kyiv that year, and much of what she has learned about weapons systems since has been self-taught and on the fly.

Since early 2023, Witch has been with her platoon in the 241st Brigade in the area around Bakhmut, supervising all of the artillery systems. She is resolute about staying in the military even if the war ends. “People who want to join the armed forces must understand that it’s a way of life,” she said.

As Ukraine struggles against fierce Russian assaults and its losses mount, there has been a surge of women who have enlisted, and they are increasingly volunteering for combat roles. The Ukrainian military has also made a concerted effort to recruit more women to fill its ranks.

ImageA group of people, three sitting in chairs and a fourth standing, are in a dark, messy room.
Image
Witch plans to stay in the military even if the war ends. “People who want to join the armed forces must understand that it’s a way of life,” she said.
Image
A close-up of a female soldier in a very dark area.
Image
Kuzya, 19, adjusting mortar fire toward Russian positions in the cover of darkness. She is the youngest member of the artillery platoon commanded by Witch and has kept her involvement in the military a secret from her family to avoid worrying them.

About 65,000 women are currently serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, about a 30 percent increase since the war began. Roughly 45,000 serve as military personnel, and the rest hold civilian positions, according to the Defense Ministry. Just over 4,000 are in combat positions.

Unlike for Ukrainian men, there is no mandatory draft for women; however, women who have medical or pharmaceutical degrees must register for the service.

These women fill a growing number of positions in the military: combat medics in assault units; senior gunners; snipers; commanders of tank units and artillery batteries; and at least one co-pilot on a medevac team who dreams of becoming Ukraine’s first female helicopter combat pilot. Dozens have been wounded in battle, and some have been killed or captured.

Along the front line, they operate under the same blanket of fear and hardship as male soldiers. In the dank, fortified shelter where Witch and one of her mortar teams spent most of their days, they waited in near darkness in the basement. Turning on lights would mean the crew could not quickly adjust their eyes to the dark if they had to go out and fire.

Farther north, a commander with the call sign Tesla, a former Ukrainian folk singer, sat hunched on a stool in the bare house serving as the field headquarters for the 32nd Mechanized Brigade. Russian forces in the Kupiansk region were sending barrages of artillery raining down on Ukrainian lines.

Tesla was simultaneously sending texts and voice notes to the soldiers in her unit while speaking to the second in command about the battlefield plan. Her oversized pants were rolled up, revealing neon orange socks with cartoon avocados on them.

She was trying to redirect Russian fire on a different battalion to her own soldiers’ position, so that the other unit could evacuate a comrade who had been badly wounded. “Three tourniquets on three different limbs,” came the information on a voice message, she said.

Image
A woman sits at a table in front of a computer while a man stands beside her. They are both wearing camouflage colors.
Image
Tesla, 21, the commander of an artillery battery, trying to divert a Russian barrage at another unit’s position to her own, to allow for the evacuation of a wounded soldier.
Image
A young woman in an interior doorway stands in front of a group of soldiers, who are turned away from the camera.
Image
Tesla was a singer before being accepted at a military academy in 2019. She was in class in her final year on the day Russia invaded Ukraine.

“Send one more,” Tesla ordered over a voice note, giving the command to her soldiers to fire again. “When you finish, inform me.”

Shortly after a Russian assault began in October, overwhelming Ukrainian lines, 24 of her soldiers trained in artillery were ordered to reinforce the infantry troops, which are always situated closest to Russian lines. Tesla spoke to them before they deployed, feeling helpless.

“The worst thing is that I instructed them on completely different things in artillery, and then they get sent to the infantry,” she said. “And, imagine, they’re standing there looking at you as their commander, knowing that they will be sent into the worst possible situation.”

Of the 24 sent forward, 15 were wounded, Tesla said, and one was captured in the fighting. The incident stayed on Tesla’s conscience, but she kept her worries to herself. Her mother still did not know that Tesla was leading an artillery battery, thinking her daughter was working as an instructor at an academy, a safe distance from the front.

Image
A female soldier is the focus of the photo, with other soldiers standing around her. They are outside, all dressed in uniform, some holding weapons.
Image
Leya, 44, a combat medic with the Third Brigade, during assault training with her unit. She first volunteered as a body collector on the front lines after the invasion and enlisted in the Ukrainian military in early 2023.
Image
A woman and two men outside the remnants of a badly damaged building.
Image
Stella, 30, is part of an aerial intelligence drone unit with the 47th Brigade. She started out as a military photographer before switching to aerial intelligence and working in a team of three near the front lines.

Until 2018, women were prohibited from holding combat positions in the Ukrainian military, though a few ignored the rules. Restrictions have been relaxed since Russia’s invasion. The enlistment of thousands more female service members in the military has largely been seen as a welcome step for the country, whose bids to join NATO and the European Union are still under review.

The downside is that the military has not been able to adapt quickly enough to accommodate them. Female soldiers say there is still a dire lack of women’s fatigues and boots, correctly fitted body armor, and feminine hygiene products. That leaves women to acquire many items on their own.

As a result, organizations like Veteranka and Zemliachky have helped fill the gap by raising money to provide items tailored to women.

Image
Two women stand one behind the other. The one in back is helping the other into a camouflage coat.
Image
A designer fitting a Ukrainian servicewoman with a winter uniform at Veteranka, a women’s veterans organization in Kyiv, the capital.
Image
A female soldier stands at the front of a line of soldiers, two of whom can be seen behind her.
Image
Olha Ostapchuk, 30, the head of the military medical unit of the 100th Brigade, with a team of medics in the Luhansk region. She was a family doctor and military reservist before the Russian invasion.

But the problems go deeper, into issues of gender-based inequality and discrimination.

Many women serving in combat roles said that male soldiers and direct superiors largely did not discriminate by gender — though there are still sexual innuendoes and inappropriate comments.

Rather, it is senior commanders, often holdovers from the Soviet-era, who look down on women in the military, especially those in combat roles. In some cases, women are choosing to join newly formed brigades with younger, more dynamic commanders.

“I didn’t want to join a brigade that was established many years ago because I knew they wouldn’t listen to me as a young officer, and as a woman,” Tesla said.

In one instance, a brigade commander was so incensed by a woman commanding an artillery battery that he belittled her directly. “You will be crawling back to me on your knees begging to leave when you realize the job is too difficult, and I won’t allow you to leave your post,” she recalled him saying, requesting anonymity to speak frankly about a sensitive subject.

Claims of sexual harassment have also surfaced. According to some women, there have been no official channels for reporting harassment other than to battalion commanders, who then have to decide whether to follow up. In some cases, female soldiers said, witnesses may decline to testify for fear of repercussions.

Those impediments, as well as the potential for hurting their military careers, discourage women from reporting harassment, female soldiers said.

Image
A female soldier sits in the hatch to a tank, with a soldier in front of and behind her.
Image
Demon, 24, a commander in the First Tank Brigade, near Avdiivka, in the Donetsk region.
Image
A female soldiers in camouflage kneels on a green pad outside in an open field.
Image
Mriya, 28, a sniper with the Third Assault Brigade, during training session in the Donetsk region.

Diana Davitian, a spokeswoman for the Defense Ministry, said that on Jan. 1, the military launched a hotline where soldiers can report sexual harassment. The reports would be investigated, she said, and measures would be taken if the accusations were found to be true.

The ministry also said it planned to create a separate unit dedicated to ensuring gender equality and providing educational programs, including one focused on combating sexual violence related to the war.

Back in the basement, Witch took a call from the command post: It was time to fire. The team scrambled into a partly covered yard a few feet away where a mortar barrel was readied.

A silence descended as Kuzya, 20, a senior gunner with the mortar platoon, looked through the scope and read out the coordinates on her phone. “Fire!” someone called out. Several more rounds were sent off before the team scrambled back into the basement, awaiting a potential return from the Russians.

Only months earlier, Kuzya’s boyfriend was killed in the fighting. She and Witch, who has a 7-year-old son she has barely seen in the past year, seemed to find solace in each other’s company. The two women trained in the same judo club in Kyiv, the capital, and the day after the invasion, they went to the enlistment office together to sign up.

For many women, war and the desire to be in combat feels like something they have prepared for for years. Foxy, 24, a former barista turned gunner and medic, volunteered to make camouflage nets after school throughout her teenage years, before she worked with injured veterans. She joined the military last year after weeks of training.

Image
A young female soldier stands outside a blue door talking to a soldier in camouflage.
Image
Foxy, 24, is a former barista turned gunner and medic with the 206th Battalion of the 214th Brigade.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Image
A female soldier sits in the cockpit of a helicopter.
Image
Kateryna, 21, is a pilot of an Mi-8 medical evacuation helicopter.

Her battalion commander gave her two options: “You’re a woman. You can work with documents or cook borscht,” Foxy recalled. “I had no choice but to handle paperwork until I switched battalions.”

She then became part of a mortar team in some of the most intense fights on the front line in Bakhmut, and was treated as an equal by her team. “While I faced some degree of sexism early on,” she said, “I feel like I don’t need to prove anything or convince anyone of what I can do.”

That is a sentiment echoed by Kateryna, 21, a lieutenant and a pilot of an Mi-8 medical evacuation helicopter. Kateryna, who graduated from a military academy, has yet to fly her first medevac mission, but she hopes to become Ukraine’s first female combat pilot.

Ukrainian society is also gradually overcoming its skepticism of women serving in the military. For now, it is up to the new generation of women and their allies who will also be better placed to address discrimination and sexual harassment.

Image
Three soldiers standing outside in a field. One is in front of a placard showing what appears to be a target for practice.
Image
Mriya, 28, back, a sniper, and Rys, 28, right, a combat medic with an assault unit, during weapons training on a field in the Donetsk region.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/10/worl ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Gender Related Issues

Post by kmaherali »

Ireland Rejects Constitution Changes, Keeping ‘Women in the Home’ Language

Two proposed amendments, which voters considered on Friday, were intended to reflect the more secular, liberal values of the nation’s modern era.

Image
Voting at a polling station on Friday in Dublin.Credit...Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

Voters in Ireland rejected two proposed changes to the country’s Constitution that would have removed language about women’s duties being in the home and broadened the definition of family beyond marriage, dealing a blow to the government that analysts said suggested the weakness of their campaign to pass the proposals.

After a series of referendums in recent years had reshaped Ireland’s Constitution in ways that reflect the country’s more secular and liberal modern identity, the result came as a surprise to some, including the government. But analysts said that rather than signaling a step back from those values, the results reflected a confusing, disjointed campaign that had left many voters reluctant to vote yes.

Each proposal was defeated by a wide margin, according to the results, which were announced on Saturday, an unexpected defeat for equality campaigners and for the coalition government of Leo Varadkar, the taoiseach, or prime minister.

Despite the fact that all of the country’s major political parties supported both proposals, some critics said the proposed clauses did not go far enough, while others faulted phrasing that they said was too broad.

Mr. Varadkar, speaking Saturday after the votes had been tallied, said the defeat was clear.

“As head of government and on behalf of the government, we accept responsibility for the result,” he said. “It was our responsibility to convince the majority of people to vote ‘Yes,’ and we clearly failed to do so.”

Irish citizens went to the polls on Friday, International Women’s Day, to vote in two referendums to amend the country’s 87-year-old Constitution, which was drafted when the Roman Catholic Church’s influence on many aspects of life in Ireland was immense.

Supporters viewed the proposed amendments as vital to ensuring that the Constitution reflected the country’s more secular and liberal modern identity. But many voted “no” to both referendum questions.

Analysts and politicians said the results were more complex than a simple rejection of the proposed changes. A lower-than-expected voter turnout and confusing messaging by the “Yes” campaign may have contributed to the proposals’ failures, they said.

Still, 44 percent of the population turned out for the vote, 67.7 percent of voters refused the changes on the family question, and 73.93 percent on the care question, according to the official results.

Laura Cahillane, an associate professor at the University of Limerick’s law school, who has written about the confusion around the referendums, said that people had concerns about wording from the start.

”When people are confused, they are a lot more likely to vote no and reject change,” Ms. Cahillane said in an interview on RTÉ, the public broadcast network, on Saturday night.

The government must now look into what went wrong, she added, pointing to the long process by a Citizens’ Assembly that led to recommendations for the proposals, which were then evaluated by a legislative committee set up specifically for the purpose. But some recommendations had been ignored, and the government had introduced its own wording.

Opposition parties and others had warned that the language was confusing, according to Ms. Cahillane, and the government and the political parties did little campaigning to drum up support for the referendums.

“There seemed to be very little interest in the government in listening to the concerns of people on the wording," she said, “And maybe a certain amount of arrogance in that they believed that people might get carried away on a wave of feminism on International Women’s Day and simply pass these two referendums.”

The first referendum question voters were asked to consider was whether to amend the Constitution’s Article 41, to provide for a wider concept of family. The suggested language would have recognized a family, “whether founded on marriage or on other durable relationships, as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of society,” and would have eliminated another clause.

The second question concerned Article 41.2, which equality activists and women’s rights groups have opposed for decades. That article says that the state “recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved” and that the state will “endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labor to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

The public voted against replacing that language with a new article that recognized all family caregivers. The proposed article stated, “The state recognizes that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”

Some opponents of the amendments had argued that the proposed language about “durable relationships” was too broad. Others said that the care provisions did not go far enough toward compelling the state to protect caregivers regardless of their gender.

Image
A person handles a stack of ballots beside a pile of rubber bands on a wooden table.
Image
Counting ballots in Dublin on Saturday.Credit...Damien Storan/Press Association, via Associated Press

The retention of Article 41.2, especially the “life within the home” clause, was met with disappointment from women’s rights groups that had long campaigned for its removal on the grounds that it was a relic of a patriarchal past.

The National Women’s Council of Ireland, a charity that promotes women’s rights and equality and had campaigned in favor of the proposals, issued a statement expressing “deep disappointment” about the “No” vote. The charity said that “while the reasons for this are complex, the result is a clear wake-up call that we cannot be complacent about equality and women’s rights.”

Even before the Constitution was first ratified in 1937, some women had demonstrated against the introduction of the language, and this year, the National Women’s Council of Ireland recreated their protest outside government buildings.

In recent decades, the Irish public has made a series of significant changes that rolled back socially conservative policies. In 1995, Ireland voted to end its ban on divorce, and a referendum in 2019 further liberalized divorce laws. In 2015, the country voted to legalize same-sex marriage, and in 2018, a referendum was held that repealed the amendment that had prohibited abortion.

The latest referendums were called after a Citizens’ Assembly in 2020 and 2021 on gender equality that made a series of recommendations, including the changes to the Constitution.

Michael McDowell, a lawyer who is an Independent member of the Seanad, the upper house of Ireland’s legislature, and was once deputy head of government, had campaigned for a “No” vote.

“The government misjudged the mood of the electorate and put before them proposals which they did not explain, proposals which could have serious consequences,” he told RTÉ

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/worl ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25107
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

A stubborn tradition

Post by kmaherali »

Image
A rally in Gambia in support of repealing a ban on female genital cutting. Malick Njie/Reuters

Yesterday, lawmakers in Gambia voted to advance legislation that would legalize female genital cutting https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/worl ... 778d3e6de3. Local analysts believe it is likely to pass.

Women have achieved so much social progress worldwide. Yet genital cutting is still on the rise. Today, 230 million women and girls around the world have been cut, a 15 percent rise from 2016. In Africa and the Middle East, several countries still permit the practice, and in many others, laws are erratically enforced.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain why cutting — which for most communities means removing the clitoris and the labia minora, or almost sealing up the vagina — has been so hard to stamp out.

Fighting a ritual

Most of the people who’ve been cut are from Africa. The practice is almost universal in Somalia and in Guinea, and more than 80 percent of girls undergo the procedure in Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Mali and Sierra Leone. But it also happens in some communities in Iraq, Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia.

In Africa, the population is growing faster than efforts to stop genital mutilation, which explains why the number of girls who are cut is rising.

Most anti-cutting campaigners locate the roots of the custom in ideas about virginity and control over women’s sexuality. Archaeologists in Egypt have discovered mummies from the fifth century B.C. with mutilated genitals. An archaeologist who studies sites in Somaliland says cutting began as a form of divine sacrifice. Other scholars argue that it is spread across such a vast array of cultures that it was adopted independently by different groups.

Men and women in Gambia holding posters and signs asking legislators not to repeal the law banning female genital cutting.

Image
Protesters outside the National Assembly in Banjul, Gambia. Malick Njie/Reuters

Cutting was first recognized as a human rights violation in 1993, in a United Nations resolution. In 1995, governments met in Beijing and pledged to work toward eliminating female genital mutilation. Organizations like the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, led the charge in the 2000s, framing it as a human rights issue.

But getting communities to abandon longstanding cultural traditions proved difficult. Laws often went unenforced. Even when they are in place, parents may have their daughters cut because they consider social ostracism to be harsher than legal penalties.

Gambia forbade genital cutting in 2015. The government didn’t try in earnest to enforce the ban until last year. Then local religious leaders revolted. They started a movement to overturn the measure.

Campaigners have had more success listening to communities and talking to them about the downsides of cutting — including severe pain, infections, complications in childbirth and of course the refusal to let women and girls determine what happens to their bodies.

My colleague Stephanie Nolen recently wrote about Burkina Faso. There, anti-cutting advocates worked with religious leaders, especially young ones, to change people’s minds. As a result, the share of girls between ages 15 and 19 who were cut has fallen by about half in the past three decades, to 39 percent.

Grass-roots persuasion

Pro-cutting voices have often portrayed bans as a Western imposition. Criticism of the West and of neocolonialism is on the rise across Africa, particularly among digitally connected young people, so this message could catch on. Africa’s population is projected to nearly double over the next 25 years. And the population is growing quickly in countries where cutting is the most entrenched, meaning many more girls could be cut in the coming decades.

One Gambian anti-cutting advocate I spoke to, Fatou Baldeh, thought cutting could be ended in a generation. After all, a woman who has not been cut is unlikely to have her daughter cut. But campaigners will have to work quicker and smarter to win over the people who believe it is a sacrosanct cultural ritual. In some places, more women than men say the practice should persist. Reaching them will require outreach and persuasion. Experts say there has not been enough in Gambia.

Baldeh said the bill to overturn the ban — and the silence from people she thought would speak against it — made her realize that cutting had deeper roots than she’d understood. Gambian lawmakers were afraid to touch it. They voted 42-4 to advance the bill that would eventually repeal the measure.

Related: Young women in Sierra Leone are defying their mothers and grandmothers by refusing to undergo genital cutting.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/heal ... 778d3e6de3
Post Reply