The NFL Team Run by Women

From The Wall Street Journal authored by Andrew Beaton:

“Catherine Carlson was surprised when she scanned the room at her first executive meeting as a senior vice president with the Philadelphia Eagles this spring.

“I’m looking around,” she says. “And there are four other women at the senior leadership table.”

The Eagles front-office is an outlier in a sports world in which most jobs, especially high-ranking ones, are still held by men. Even though women make up nearly half of NFL fans, only 35% of jobs in the league office are held by women, according to the latest report from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. That number drops to 29% when it comes to senior executives.

The numbers are even lower at the team level. NFL franchise employees were only 28% women last year, and 18% at the VP-level and higher. Only 23 of the league’s 32 franchises reported employing more than one woman vice president last year.

But in Philadelphia, more than half of owner Jeffrey Lurie’s top advisers are women—and that makes them a leading exception in the NFL.”

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Why It Matters That ‘Emily Doe’ in the Brock Turner Case Is Asian-American

From The New York Times authored by Lisa Ko:

“When Emily Doe’s victim impact statement was published on BuzzFeed in June 2016, I read it in one breathless sitting. The previous day, she had read her statement at the sentencing hearing for Brock Turner, who was found guilty of three counts of felony sexual assault by a California jury. The maximum sentence for such a conviction was 14 years, but the judge, Aaron Persky, sentenced Mr. Turner to six months in county jail. He served three. Emily Doe’s statement went viral, read aloud on the floor of the House of Representatives and on CNN, and fueled public outrage over Mr. Turner’s lenient sentence. Later that year California imposed mandatory minimum sentences for sexual assault crimesand in 2018, voters recalled Judge Persky.

I connected with Emily Doe’s fury over Mr. Turner’s lack of remorse and how the legal system dehumanizes survivors of sexual violence, from Mr. Turner’s father arguing that his son’s life was ruined by “20 minutes of action” to the defense lawyer interrogating the victim about her clothing choices and drinking habits. This month, Chanel Miller revealed herself to be Emily Doe, and her memoir, “Know My Name,” was published this week.

When I learned Ms. Miller is white and Chinese-American, I realized I’d first assumed that Emily Doe was white, a reminder of how often we internalize whiteness as a default in America. Ms. Miller is more than her racial identity alone, but the knowledge that she is Asian-American necessitates a new understanding of what she experienced and how she was perceived — as a woman of color, assaulted by a white man, trying to obtain justice in a courtroom presided over by a white male judge.”

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Back-to-School Night Is Hard for Single Parents

From The Atlantic authored by Alia Wong:

“Susan Dynarski’s husband always took the lead at their kids’ school events, asking questions, getting updates, and advocating for their success. When Dynarski, whose job as a professor at the University of Michigan requires a lot of travel, wasn’t relying on her husband’s “social capital” at these gatherings, she was relying on him as an ally. “The parent-teacher nights were always something we did together,” she told me, even if that just meant they would simultaneously roll their eyes at a teacher or fellow parent. “So much of parenting is reflecting with each other, talking with each other as a sounding board.”

Now “all of that is missing,” Dynarski says. Her husband died of a heart attack in the spring of 2017, forcing Dynarski to attend back-to-school nights for their kids, now a high-school junior and a college sophomore, alone.* Seeing other couples at these gatherings is the hardest part, she says, because they remind her that she’s no longer one of them—that the days of seeing her husband wedge himself into miniature chairs and desks and having backup while she navigated school events are gone.

Back-to-school nights are meant to welcome and orient families to their kids’ schools, giving parents a chance to meet their kids’ teachers, and schools the opportunity to communicate their plans for the upcoming year. But for single parents who have to attend them alone, such events can have the opposite of the intended effect, making them feel isolated and overwhelmed. For those contending with a divorce or breakup—or, like Dynarski, with a death—these emotions may be compounded by grief. Dynarski, whose son is now in college, last year attended a dinner convening parents of incoming freshmen at the school; attendees were asked to go around introducing themselves, and Dynarski says her “stomach began to sink” as it became clear that pretty much every other parent was there with someone else.”

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Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers From Seeing Job Ads. The Federal Government Thinks That’s Illegal.

From ProPublica authored by Ariana Tobin:

“Two years ago, ProPublica and The New York Times revealed that companies were posting discriminatory job ads on Facebook, using the social network’s targeting tools to keep older workers from seeing employment opportunities. Then we reported companies were using Facebook to exclude women from seeing job ads.

Experts told us that it was most likely illegal. And it turns out the federal government now agrees.

A group of recent rulings by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found “reasonable cause” to conclude that seven employers violated civil rights protections by excluding women or older workers or both from seeing job ads they posted on Facebook.”

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Many U.S. women say their first sexual experience was forced

From The Seattle Times authored by Lindsey Tanner:

“The first sexual experience for 1 in 16 U.S. women was forced or coerced intercourse in their early teens, encounters that for some may have had lasting health repercussions, a study suggests.

The experiences amount to rape, the authors say, although they relied on a national survey that didn’t use the word in asking women about forced sex.

Almost 7 percent of women surveyed said their first sexual intercourse experience was involuntary; it happened at age 15 on average and the man was often several years older.

Almost half of those women who said intercourse was involuntary said they were held down and slightly more than half of them said they were verbally pressured to have sex against their will.”

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Why the patriarchy is killing men

From The Washington Post authored by Liz Plank:

“When I traveled to Iceland in 2018, the World Economic Forum had ranked it No. 1 in gender equality for an entire decade. According to the common way of discussing that honor, the country must be a feminist utopia for women. What goes underreported is how great it is for men, too. In fact, Icelandic men enjoy the highest life expectancy in Europe. They live almost as long as women do. If the number of years spent on Earth is one of the strongest predictors of well-being, Icelandic men are doing pretty well.

Is there some unique magic in the Reykjavik air that makes this possible? Not at all. Iceland offers a model that could be widely adopted elsewhere in the world. It helps show that changing men’s ideas about what it means to be a man, and lifting up women in the process, doesn’t make men worse off — it has far-reaching benefits to their lives.

The health advantages of feminism for men are not evident only in Iceland. In other countries with stronger gender equality, men also tend to fare better. According to research by Norwegian sociologist and men’s studies expert Oystein Gullvag Holter, there is a direct correlation between the state of gender equality in a country and male well-being, as measured by factors such as welfare, mental health, fertility and suicide. Men (and women) in more gender-equal countries in Europe are less likely to get divorced, be depressed or die as a result of violence.

These findings undercut one of the favorite facts of men’s rights activists — that men die younger than women do. They use this data point to argue that feminism is unwarranted because women already live fuller (or at least longer) lives. But a world without feminism would exacerbate this problem, not solve it. Feminism is the antidote to shorter male life expectancy. Saying feminism causes men to decline is like saying firefighters cause fire.”

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Cokie Roberts was all about paying it forward — and paving the way — for the women she worked with

From The Washington Post authored by Madhulika Sikka:

“Social media is rife Tuesday with tributes to Cokie Roberts — especially from womenand especially from women who are journalists — about what she meant to them as a role model, mentor, guide and friend.

I counted her as all those things, so I can also guarantee you that there are female journalists today who have no idea that Cokie did something to nudge or boost their career. She was paying it forward before we even knew what that was.

She died Tuesday at the age of 75.

You know Cokie as the consummate Washington journalist and commentator. Some called her an insider; after all, her late father was Democratic Majority Leader Hale Boggs (he died in an airplane crash in 1972), and President Lyndon Johnson and first lady Lady Bird Johnson attended her wedding at her family home.”

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What would parenting be like if fathers took six months of parental leave? Take a look.

From The Washington Post authored by Samantha Schmidt:

“The photos all show seemingly mundane moments of family life: A parent bathing an infant in a kitchen sink, another wrangling toddlers into a stroller, or coaxing a forkful of food into a daughter’s mouth.

If the parents had all been mothers, the photos wouldn’t be particularly exceptional.

But all of the images are of men — fathers who, given generous parental paid leave by their government, chose to stay at home with their child for at least six months.

The images are part of a photo exhibition called “Swedish Dads,” a series of portraits of 45 fathers on display through December at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington. The exhibition, by Swedish photographer Johan Bävman, has toured 65 countries, but this is its first time in the United States.

As he debuts his photo series for an American audience, Bävman hopes to tell a story of gender equality in parenting, of a new perception of masculinity and what a society could look like if it truly prioritized both.”

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Women’s Share of Board Seats Rises to 20%

From The Wall Street Journal authored by Rachel Feintzeig:

“One-fifth of seats on a broad swath of public-company boards are now held by women, a sign of change as U.S. corporations face increased pressure to diversify.

The share of female board members in the Russell 3000 index, which includes most public companies on major U.S. stock exchanges, increased to 20% in the second quarter of this year from 19% the previous quarter, according to Equilar Inc., a governance-data firm. When Equilar began tracking the measure in late 2016, 15% of board seats were filled by women.

The increases come amid calls for change from big investors and a new California law mandating female representation on public-company boards. In July, the last all-male board among S&P 500 companies—Dallas-based online car-auction company Copart Inc.CPRT -0.35% —added a female finance executive to its ranks.”

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For the first time, most new working-age hires in the U.S. are people of color

From The Washington Post authored by Heather Long and Andrew Van Dam:

“When Mónica Hernández told her husband that her 2019 New Year’s resolution was to go back to work, he was surprised. He kept asking her if that’s what she really wanted to do. She had been out of the workforce for a year after a difficult pregnancy and the birth of their first child.

“I want to put my brain to use,” Hernández told her husband. “Now my son is here, and it makes me want to do even more.”

Hernández, 28, landed a job this spring as a part-time receptionist at Impressions Pediatric Therapy in Maryland, making her part of a surge of Hispanic and African American women who are entering the workforce amid one of the hottest labor markets in U.S. history.

Today, she earns $15 an hour, a big jump from the $9-an-hour cashier jobs she once thought would be her working life. Clients like that Hernández is bilingual, and the owner of the fast-growing therapy practice just offered her a full-time position.

The surge of minority women getting jobs has helped push the U.S. workforce across a historic threshold. For the first time, most new hires of prime working age (25 to 54) are people of color, according to a Washington Post analysis of data the Labor Department began collecting in the 1970s. Minority hires overtook white hires last year.”

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