Knock Knock. Who’s There? It’s Men.

From The Cut authored by Opheli Garcia Lawler:

“Ladies, it’s time to dull it down at the office — our humor is apparently holding us back from advancing in our careers. No more clever jokes at the watercooler, no more funny one-liners to break the ice at meetings, no more witty remarks to ease any tension in your office.

According to a new study from a group of researchers at the University of Arizona, women who are witty at work are often taken less seriously and could even miss out on opportunities for promotion. According to the findings of the study, which surveyed over 300 people, a funny woman is more likely to be perceived as less effective and lacking leadership skills than a funny man.”

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Is your pregnancy app sharing your intimate data with your boss?

From The Washington Post authored by Drew Harwell:

“Like millions of women, Diana Diller was a devoted user of the pregnancy-tracking app Ovia, logging in every night to record new details on a screen asking about her bodily functions, sex drive, medications and mood. When she gave birth last spring, she used the app to chart her baby’s first online medical data — including her name, her location and whether there had been any complications — before leaving the hospital’s recovery room.

But someone else was regularly checking in, too: her employer, which paid to gain access to the intimate details of its workers’ personal lives, from their trying-to-conceive months to early motherhood. Diller’s bosses could look up aggregate data on how many workers using Ovia’s fertility, pregnancy and parenting apps had faced high-risk pregnancies or gave birth prematurely; the top medical questions they had researched; and how soon the new moms planned to return to work.

“Maybe I’m naive, but I thought of it as positive reinforcement: They’re trying to help me take care of myself,” said Diller, 39, an event planner in Los Angeles for the video game company Activision Blizzard. The decision to track her pregnancy had been made easier by the $1 a day in gift cards the company paid her to use the app: That’s “diaper and formula money,” she said.

Period- and pregnancy-tracking apps such as Ovia have climbed in popularity as fun, friendly companions for the daunting uncertainties of childbirth, and many expectant women check in daily to see, for instance, how their unborn babies’ size compares to different fruits or Parisian desserts.

But Ovia also has become a powerful monitoring tool for employers and health insurers, which under the banner of corporate wellness have aggressively pushed to gather more data about their workers’ lives than ever before.”

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Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly.

From The New York Times authored by Julia Jacobs:

“…Studies on Wikipedia’s contributor base from several years ago estimated that fewer than 20 percent of editors were women. This research backed up an existing awareness in the Wikipedia community that female editors were seriously underrepresented, galvanizing activists who set out to recruit more women to write and edit articles.

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‘Balancing the Scales’: Have Women Lawyers’ Expectations Changed in the Past 50 Years?

From Attorney at Work authored by Kristin Tyler:

“I’m in my 30s and I’m a single, childless associate who has no idea if I will be on partnership track. I have considered dropping out of the law entirely as I’m not sure if I can physically do this anymore. How can I communicate my needs to my firm without sounding like a whiny millennial?”

“This was one of the most poignant questions at a recent viewing of “Balancing the Scales,” a documentary about women lawyers in America. Filmmaker Sharon Rowen visited Las Vegas for a screening of the movie and led a panel discussion following it. Rowen is a litigator from Atlanta who began making documentaries like this over 20 years ago.

Panelists included Kathy England, a former president of the Nevada State Bar and partner at Gilbert & England Law Firm; Erika Pike Turner, partner at Garman Turner Gordon; Sylvia Tiscareno, general counsel for William Hill; and Moorea Katz, associate attorney at the H1 Law Group.

Responding to the young associate, Rowen noted, ‘Some of the old guard will never change. Just know that. There are some women who have come through the fire and are disdainful of younger women wanting it to be easier than how they had it. Things will change one person at a time. You have to individually evaluate your situation.’”

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Lady Hale: at least half of UK judiciary should be female

From The Guardian authored by Diane Taylor:

“At least half of the judiciary should be women, Britain’s most senior judge has said.

Speaking at an event in the supreme court to mark the centenary of women’s entry into the legal profession, Brenda Hale, president of the supreme court and the first woman to take on that role, made the call for full gender equality across the judiciary.

According to last year’s Ministry of Justice figures, just 29% of court judges are currently women. The ratio of female to male judges is higher in the lower courts but in the UK’s top court, the supreme court, three out of 12 justices are female. The situation in tribunals is more equal with 46% of judges there being female.

Speaking about the importance of diversity in the judiciary, Lady Hale said that, as women made up half of the population, “we should be half of judges at least”. Hale recently said that the 2018 increase to a quarter of judges in the supreme court was an important breakthrough.”

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For the first time, a state’s National Guard command staff is made up of all women

From The Washington Post authored by Samantha Schmidt:

“It wasn’t until the Cold War, in the mid-1950s, that women were allowed to join the National Guard — as medical officers. It would take four more decades for a woman to rise to the level of a state adjutant general, the top commander of a state’s military forces.

Now, for the first time in the nation, a state National Guard — Maryland’s — is led by a command staff of all women. As of last fall, the top four leaders in the state’s National Guard are all women — three of them African American — and all mothers.”

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Girls were forced to wear skirts at school to ‘preserve chivalry.’ So they sued — and won.

From The Washington Post authored by Kayla Epstein:

“Every so often, Charter Day School in North Carolina would hold fire or tornado drills in which students had to kneel and protect their heads from flying debris or crawl on the ground to avoid imaginary smoke.

But girls had a much more immediate threat to fear: the boys.

“I don’t think the boys were supposed to be looking up our skirts, but they did,” former student Keely Burks said in a statement to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. “I wished I was wearing pants or shorts during those drills.”

She was prohibited by the school’s uniform policy.”

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Old Rape Kits Finally Got Tested. 64 Attackers Were Convicted.

From The New York Times authored by Ali Watkins:

“By February 2017, Maisha Sudbeck had made peace with the idea she would never get justice. It had been five years since she was raped in Tucson by a man she had met online. The police had brushed the case off as a he-said-she-said standoff. For years, her rape evidence kit had sat untested. With two children and a new marriage, she had moved on with her life.

Then a detective knocked on her door.

The detective said a grant from the Manhattan district attorney’s office had helped the Tucson authorities clear a backlog of untested rape kits, which preserve the DNA evidence left by an attacker. After five years, Ms. Sudbeck’s kit had finally been tested, the detective said. And the police had found a match in a database of people with criminal records: a man named Nathan Loebe.

“My chapter was reopened,” Ms. Sudbeck said. “Having my kit finally tested was a catalyst for hope.”

In February, Mr. Loebe was convicted of sexually assaulting Ms. Sudbeck and six other women. Ms. Sudbeck testified against him at trial.”

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Breast Implants Are Linked to Cancer—and Women Are Demanding the FDA Do More

From Glamour authored by Macaela Mackenzie:

“Getting breast implants is a highly personal choice. Whether you find think they are genuinely empowering or find more power in being au naturel, women should be informed of the risks—especially since breast implants are linked to cancer. Now women are demanding the U.S. Food and Drug Administration step up.

Earlier this week the FDA agreed during a public hearing that the agency needs to do more to warn women of the risks of breast implants after hearing powerful testimonies from women like Jamee Cook, a former E.R. paramedic turned patient advocate. She shared that she dealt with serious complications for years: swollen lymph nodes, killer migraines, constant fatigue, and even a low-grade fever, The Washington Post reported. “I was not warned,” about the risks, she told the committee, despite the fact that women have been reporting problems like this after getting implants since the 1960s.

There’s an even more serious risk associated with breast implants: cancer. The link between certain types of breast implants and cancer is long-established—in 2011 the FDA identified a possible connection between implants and a heightened risk of a rare immune system cancer called anaplastic large cell lymphoma (or breast implant associated ALCL). At the time the data was too thin to deter many women (or doctors), but a few more years of research proved the connection. In 2016 the World Health Organization confirmed the link.”

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Womansplaining the Pay Gap

From The New York Times authored by Maya Salam:

“If I had a nickel for every time someone told me, “The gender pay gap is a myth,” I may have made back the income I’ve lost over the years for being a woman.

It’s not a myth. And yet the nuance required to explain what perpetuates these misconceptions is not the stuff made for 280-character sound bites on social media, where sweeping dismissals (Men work longer hours! Men pick higher-paying careers!) can quickly snowball.

Today is Equal Pay Day — created in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of women’s, civil rights and labor groups, to draw attention to the gender pay disparities in the United States. The day marks about how long into 2019 American women would have to work to earn what their male counterparts already earned last year. (Though race factors into this as well. More on that below.)

I asked Jessica Bennett, The Times’s gender editor and author of the book “Feminist Fight Club,” to demystify some commonly misunderstood aspects of the pay gap. Here’s what she said.”

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