‘I Was Angry.’ Taylor Swift on What Powered Her Sexual Assault Testimony

From TIME authored by Eliana Dockterman:

“Before the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke, and before #MeToo swept the Internet, Taylor Swift testified in court on Aug. 10 about being assaulted in a room full of people. Swift, who TIME recognized as one of the Silence Breakers who inspired women to speak out about harassment in this year’s Person of the Year issue, granted TIME her first interview since the trial.

In 2013, the singer-songwriter took a photo with a Colorado radio DJ after an interview. During that photo, Swift says, DJ David Mueller reached under her skirt and grabbed her rear end. Swift privately reported the incident to the station at which Mueller worked, and he was fired. Mueller then sued Swift for defamation; she countersued for a symbolic $1—and won.

Swift refused to be bullied on the stand. Her straightforward testimony was lauded by many for its fierceness. When asked why the pictures taken during the assault didn’t show the front of her skirt wrinkled as evidence of any wrongdoing, she said simply, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” When asked if she felt guilty about Mueller losing his job, she said, ‘I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.’”

 

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12 Things That Happen When You Grow Up With A Mom Who’s An Alpha Female

From Pucker Mom authored by Anna Bashedly:

“Growing up, my mom was rarely “well-behaved”; she was defined by her courage, kindness and decisions to go after the life she wanted to live, instead of restricted by what was was “correct” and expected of her.

She could light up any room with her alluring energy, and could straightforwardly intimidate close-minded people. Growing up with her taught and inspired me to relish in my independence and unapologetically go after what made me happy – fearlessly, without caring about the approval of others.

If you grew up with a mom who was an Alpha-Female, you might recognize these 12 traits that you’ve inherited from your badass super hero.”

 

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Melinda Gates: The World is Finally Listening. Me too. Me too. Me too.

From Time authored by Melinda Gates:

“In 1976, one year after the term “sexual harassment” was coined, the magazine Redbook reported that 90 percent of women surveyed said they’d been sexually harassed at work. Last year, the Elephant in the Valley study revealed that 60 percent of women in tech had been subject to unwanted sexual advances. It’s disheartening to think that Silicon Valley today, in some ways the most innovative place in the world, is in other ways almost half a century in the past.

But 2017 is proving to be a watershed moment for women in the workplace and beyond. Instead of being bullied into retreat or pressured into weary resignation, we are raising our voices—and raising them louder than ever before. What’s more, the world is finally listening.

The stories women are telling are not new—nor, by any means, are they limited to Silicon Valley and Hollywood. I’ve spent the last 20 years talking to women all over the globe, and I hear these stories everywhere I go. From board rooms to presidential palaces to mats spread on the ground in the world’s poorest villages, the message from women is the same: Me too. Me too. Me too.”

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The Year Women Found Their Rage

From The Huffington Post authored by Emma Gray:

“A year ago tonight, I thought I was about to walk into the room where our first female president would take the stage.

The energy was electric when my team and I arrived at the Javits Center in the early evening hours of Nov. 8. There was premature (and, in retrospect, completely unearned) celebratory chatter, and lots of female reporters excitedly greeting each other in the press area downstairs.

Of course, we all now know how that night ended. I did not see a woman elected president of the United States. Instead, as the hours crept by and it became increasingly clear that Hillary Clinton would not be our president, the air inside the Javits Center felt stifling. The sprawling glass ceiling went from symbolic to a cruel joke. Instead of talking to overjoyed grandmothers and teen girls as I thought I would be that night, I spent hours interviewing sobbing men and women as they clutched their tightly wound American flags and fled Clinton’s public block party.

2016 would not be the year the proverbial glass ceiling was shattered. As Jia Tolentino put it in December, we had “played ourselves” ― and badly.

It feels impossible that 365 days have passed since that one. Nov. 8, 2016 feels like yesterday yet also like a different plane of existence. I’m a far more exhausted, deadened-on-the-inside person now than I was on that day ― a more exhausted, deadened-on-the-inside woman with a far clearer vision of the country she lives in. The last year has been full of sobering self-reflection ― as a woman, as a white person, and as a member of the media.”

 

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Unhappy Hour: Law Firms’ Drinking Culture Amplifies Sexual Harassment Problems

From The American Lawyer authored by Patrick R. Krill:

Dear Patrick:

“Considering the increased spotlight on sexual misconduct in the workplace these days, I’m curious what you think about the relationship between lawyers, drinking, and bad behavior? What should an employer be looking out for?

Sue in New Jersey

Dear Sue:

When the Harvey Weinstein story broke a little over a month ago, I don’t think any employer—legal or otherwise—could have known how much broader and deeper the conversation about sexual harassment and misconduct was about to become. Forget the crazy-making velocity of news in general these days. The headlines about sexual harassment and predation alone are enough to make your head spin if you spend more than five minutes online. Newspapers and radio stations are now keeping running tallies of all the accusations against public figures and high-level executives that have been leveled PW (Post-Weinstein), and there doesn’t appear to be any end in sight. We’re in uncharted waters, and you are dead right to think it’s an issue highly germane to a profession known for its heavy and hard drinking.

However, before we get into the nexus between liquor and lewdness, highballs and harassment, let me start by stating the obvious: Some people are just prone to offensive, inappropriate, or troubling behavior regardless of whether they are stone-sober or high as a kite. I’ve heard plenty of stories of egregious lawyer behavior that occurred in the absence of any intoxicants, so I wouldn’t want anyone reading this to think they could eliminate the risk of sexual misconduct by canceling all happy hours until further notice.”

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Millennial Moms: Make Home Work Like Work

From Medium authored by Neal Godfrey:

“The big news in the workplace over the past couple of decades has been the emergence of women as a significant force. We had the opportunity to show what we can do, and we’ve done it. We’ve made the workplace a different place, a better place. We are educated, motivated, and street-smart. Women are taking the world by storm. Seventy-one percent of women with kids work outside of the home. We have been incredibly successful at work; however, we have not necessarily translated that success to managing our households.

Process vs. Project

Here’s another significant change that has occurred in the workplace over the past couple of decades: modern management strategy has moved from a process-oriented workplace to a project-oriented workplace.

Work used to be built around a process. Big manufacturing companies make the same thing — cars, steel girders, stuffed panda bears — and people, in one way or another, were plugged into that process. They did the same job day after day. At home, the “process” meant you lived in the same house, in the same neighborhood, and with the same neighbors. It meant you didn’t get divorced. Well, those days are gone forever. My own work life has bounced me around like a pinball, and I’m now the norm.

The rest of our lives follow the same checkered pattern as our careers. We move around, we work remotely, we get divorced, we partner, we often re-partner, and we create stepfamilies; all of these situations come with unique challenges of their own.”

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Women’s Whisper Network Raises Its Voice

From The New York Times authored by Julie Creswell and Tiffany Hsu:

“They called themselves the Glass Ceiling Club.

A group of young and ambitious women in the 1990s from the investment bank Bear Stearns would gather at local restaurants every couple of months to discuss how to make the workplace more female friendly. The conversations would inevitably turn to their male colleagues, including the ones who behaved badly, said Maureen Sherry, a former managing director, who met regularly with the other women.

“Of course, our conversations would revert to sharing facts we knew about the men we worked with,” recalled Ms. Sherry, who spent nine years at Bear Stearns before leaving in 2000, adding, ‘yes, it was mostly the same men who preyed on young women.’”

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The Tech Industry’s Gender-Discrimination Problem

From The New Yorker authored by Sheelah Kolhatkar:

“One day in 2013, AJ Vandermeyden drove to Tesla’s corporate headquarters, in Palo Alto, California, sat down on a bench outside the main entrance, and waited, in the hope of spotting someone who looked like a company employee. Vandermeyden, who was thirty years old, had been working as a pharmaceutical sales representative since shortly after college, but she wanted a different kind of job, in what seemed to her the center of the world—Silicon Valley. She knew that Tesla’s ambitious, eccentric co-founder Elon Musk was managing companies devoted to space flight and solar energy, in addition to running Tesla, which was producing electric cars, and she was inspired by his mission. Tesla was growing quickly and offered numerous opportunities for employees to advance. The company, Musk liked to say, was a “meritocracy,” and Vandermeyden wanted to be a part of it.

Vandermeyden saw a man wearing a Tesla T-shirt and walked over to introduce herself. After she found out that he worked in sales, the department she wanted to join, she decided to deliver her pitch to him right then. He seemed impressed by her nerve. A few weeks later, she was hired at Tesla as a product specialist in the inside-sales department.

At first, Vandermeyden thrived at Tesla. After almost a year, she was promoted to the job of engineering project coördinator in the paint department. The new position involved working out of Tesla’s automotive manufacturing facility in Fremont, California, where hundreds of apple-red robot arms assembled Tesla vehicles on a white factory floor. The whirr of the robots in motion gave the plant the feel of something out of science fiction.

But even in this futuristic environment there was something about life at Tesla that seemed distinctly atavistic—and deeply wrong. Vandermeyden, who worked closely with a group of eight other employees, soon learned that her salary was lower than that of everyone else in the group, including several new hires who had come to Tesla straight out of college. She was, as it happened, the only woman in the group. Her supervisors, and her supervisors’ supervisors, were male, all the way up the chain, it seemed, to Musk himself.”

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India Rules Sex With a Child Bride Is Always Rape in a Massive Win for Girls’ Rights

From Global Citizen authored by Imogen Calderwood:

“India’s top court has ruled that sex with a child is always rape, quashing a clause that allowed men to have sex with underage girls if they were married to them.

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Wednesday closed a legal loophole that has historically allowed perpetrators of rape to escape punishment.

While the age of consent in India is 18, there was a clause in India’s rape laws that lowered the age of consent to 15 if the girl was married.

But the court has now ruled that the clause is “discriminatory, capricious, and arbitrary”, and ‘violates the bodily integrity of the girl child’”.

 

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Women Lawyers are Being Driven to Drink

From Tonic authored by Britni De La Cretaz:

“The morning before Lisa F. Smith, the author of Girl Walks Out of A Bar: A Memoir, checked herself into rehab, she says her breakfast consisted of a bottle of red wine and several lines of cocaine. It was her morning routine, and she needed the alcohol and drugs in her system in order to make it to her job at a law firm every day. When she finally decided she needed help, the last thing she wanted to do was let the firm know that she was struggling with addiction.

“When I checked myself into detox, I told [the law firm] I had a stomach issue and that I would be out for a week. I told them I’d be back the next week,” Smith, 51, tells me over the phone from her office in New York City. “They [the detox] wanted me to go to a 20-day longer rehab. And I was like absolutely not, I can’t tell my law firm I’m going to rehab. It’s not happening.”

So Smith went right back to work. She says she went into an intensive night rehab because she couldn’t go during the days, and she started going to 12-step meetings. “It’s a miracle I stayed sober because I wouldn’t recommend the approach anyone,” she says. “‘I went back [to work] and everyone was like, ‘How’s your stomach?'”

 

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