Apt. 11D

Wikipedia's Woman Problem

Wikipedia has a woman problem.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Why aren't women contributing info to wikipedia?

Read the whole article.

The Girl Effect

NSFW

I just came across two interesting articles discussing sex and feminism. A blogger who writes about her life as an escort says that women shouldn't envy her, but they do. How has hardcore online porn changed us?

Are Girls Better Off?

I have a swirl of blog posts in my head, and I'm trying to sort out the contradictions this morning.

Caitlin Flanagan writes about the woman at Duke who turned her sexual exploits into a vicious PowerPoint presentation and finds her pitiable. Hanna Rosin says that the the PowerPoint slides were funny and empowering. Some Princeton grads exchange vile e-mails about their sexual exploits and are regarded as scum.

Is competitive, cruel, and documented promiscuity gross when men do it, but cool and empowering when women do it? Confused.

This week, it was hard to turn away from the gross details of Hugh Hefner's sex life. A room full of blond 20-year olds had ritualized group sex with an 80 year old. Some of the participants explained that they were grossed out by these evenings, but Hugh handed them $2,000 out of his safe at the end of evening and provided free plastic surgery to the girls. They endured Vigra-fueled evenings for the opportunity to meet Charlie Sheen and to make their B's into double D's.

Last week, I stumbled across a show on E! called, Bridalplasty. It's a reality show where girls compete to win plastic surgery, so they can look their boob-alicious best on their wedding day.

How does all this gel with the statistics that show that girls are outperforming boys in school? Hanna Rosin's TED talk on the "End of Men" makes a compelling case for a future run by women. It's hard to imagine those busty girls in wedding dresses running a multinational company. Will Hef's sexmates ever argue a case before the Supreme Court? Probably not. Duke's PowerPoint girl will probably be able to shake off her notoriety and end up as one of Hanna's success stories, but snickers will follow her into the boardroom.

I suppose there have always been girls like Hef's sex-for-surgery gals, who have no other options in life beyond becoming sex toys for rich, old men. Despite gains in education and career success for women as a whole, there are still these pathetic creatures. It's tempting after one watches Rosin's TED Talk, to say "OK, feminism has won. We're done. Time to pack up and look for another fight." Clearly, we're not done yet.

Women with Children are "Leaking" Out of Research Science

From the Economix:

More women are obtaining Ph.D.’s in science than ever before, but those women — largely because of pressures from having a family — are far more likely than their male counterparts to “leak” out of the research science pipeline before obtaining tenure at a college or university.

Women and Credit Cards

In an interesting post at Double X, Helaine Olen explains that a new law aimed at limiting credit cards to college students might inadvertantly restrict credit cards to stay-at-home parents.

Olen also points out that women were only issued credit cards with their own names in the mid-70s.

It wasn’t so long ago that women were denied all independent access to banking, credit, and other financial services without their husbands’ permission. This changed with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in the 1970s, something we now so take for granted that it almost never occurs to us that a woman’s right to her own credit and credit history is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s so new that many of us over the age of 40 can actually recall our mother’s first individual credit cards and the reverence with which those cards were treated. (In our house, my mother’s first individual card was from Macy’s, a store she eventually would go on to work for as a saleswoman for almost a decade.)

Despite being in that age group, I'll admit that I didn't realize that women couldn't get credit cards in their own name until the 1970s. So, I called my mom to ask her about it. She had always managed the family finances, even endorsing my dad's checks for him, so her name on the credit card wasn't a big milestone for her, but she recognized the importance of women having their own credit history apart from their husband.

While it is very important to reform credit card practices with college aged students, the laws need to be written in such a way that don't impact on lesser-earning spouses.

Economic Inequality and Babies

Melanie Thernstrom writes about her experiences with using egg donors and surrogates to produce her kids. If she had written a "just the facts" sort of story, I would have read the first paragraph or two and then moved on. Instead, she wrote a long rationalization for her method of producing kids and completely ignored the risk and the economics of child-birth, which caused me to read the whole thing and run to the computer on this Saturday -- a non-blogging day.

In early her 40s, Thernstrom was unable to make a baby on her own, and adoption wasn't an option. She said that it's harder to adopt children today, because of abortion and international restrictions. Actually, she could have adopted a kid with special needs pretty easily, but she failed to mention that. Friends of ours recently adopted a little girl from China who had a cleft palate, so it can be done. 

She received eggs from a donor and used two surrogates to produce two babies. My usual reaction to surrogacy is that these are consenting adults, who should be allowed to do whatever stupid-assed thing that they want to do, as long as we don't pretend that they are making good decisions.

In 1986, Mary Beth Whitehead, a surrogate mother, gave birth to Baby M and then refused to hand it over to the Sterns, a couple from my home town. Whitehead agreed to have the baby for the Sterns, because she needed the money. However, she bonded with the child during the nine months pregnancy and couldn't give her up. After a long legal battle, Baby M went to the Sterns, and New Jersey no longer allows surrogates to accept cash.

Thernstrom says that her children were born out of the generosity of other people. No, they were born out of economic inequality. Thernstrom had the money to pay for their services, and these people needed the money.

Harvesting eggs is a lot harder than getting a sperm donation. There is much more involved that an old issue of Penthouse and a plastic cup. Egg donors have to take fertility pills for a while, so they produce more eggs. Eggs are removed during an operation. There are risks that accompany this procedure, including infertility. Nobody in their right mind would go through the hassle of egg donations for free. That's why women are paid about $4,000 for this service.

Egg donation is a breeze compared with pregnancy and birth. While some women truly love the experience of pregnancy, it does horrific stuff to your body. Death is always a possibility during birth. Giving up a child that you carried for nine months is a traumatic experience.

The only reason that a woman would deal with the enormous physical pain of pregnancy and birth and then the emotional pain of handing over a child, while she's lactating, is money.

Thernstrom mentions that one of the surrogates provided her with breast milk in a cooler every week. The surrogate's milk would drop when she heard the baby cry. Thernstrom then rambles on about that she generously let the surrogate breast feed the baby, but was unable to understand the physical pain of having engorged breasts with no relief of a baby.

Thernstrom fails to give us the dollar amount for her children. In a long story that provides us with every other minor detail (a doula is dismissed for being insensitive), she leaves out the dollar amount for her kids. I don't need a degree in psychology to recognize repression and denial when I see it. I feel like I should I sit down next to her, hold her hand and tell her the truth.

Listen, honey, I know that you must have been in a lot of pain when you realized that you couldn't have children on your own. Some people really, really need to have children, and it's earth-shattering when you are denied something that you wanted a lot. However, you have to recognize that the egg donors and the surrogates provided a service for you, because of CASH. They needed it and you had a whole lot of it. If they had enough money, they would have never gone through with the physical and emotional hardships and the social stigma of egg harvesting and pregnancy. They might have had a baby on their own and kept it. Please be honest about the cash relationship between you and the donors.

As I said in the beginning, I think child surrogacy should be legal (though heavily regulated), but I'm really uncomfortable with these white-washing stories that fail to recognize the hardships and economics of childbirth.

The End of Men

Hanna Rosin is talking about the "End of Men."

Geena Davis Contines to Kick Ass

 Geena Davis was quite certain that there weren't enough roles for women in film and was tired of getting poo-pooed by studio executives who denied that there was a problem. So, she sponsored her own academic study and found that her suspicions were correct.

So, Davis set out to find data. She founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2006 and sponsored an academic study — enlisting professors at the U.S.C. Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to analyze the content of 101 children’s movies released between 1990 and 2004. Last year she followed up with an analysis of films from 2004 to 2009. Both reached the same conclusions. Of the 5,554 speaking characters studied, 71 percent were male and 29 percent were female. That’s a 2.42 to 1 ratio, which has not changed much in 20 years.

Not only were female leads in short supply, researchers found, but in crowd scenes and group scenes only 17 percent of characters were women. In addition, female characters were far more likely to be “hypersexualized” — 25 percent were wearing tight , provocative, revealing clothing, compared with four percent of males — and physically attractive (14 percent versus. 3.6 percent). The female characters were younger than their male counterparts, and the sole goal of the females was usually to find romance. Not one of the animated female characters had a shape that was possible in real life.

Women only compose 17 percent of characters in group scenes. What?? We can't even mill about mindlessly in the background of a shot? That's just crazy.

My buddy, Erin, (Marketing, Media, and Childhood) attended the SPARK conference in New York a few weeks ago. Davis was the keynote speaker; Erin was very impressed with her. Here's her blog post about the event. While you're there, read Erin's post about gendered toys.

Appreciated and Compensated?

I stopped working at the college a year and a half ago. For the most part, leaving academia was  a good thing.

Although I really liked my job, I managed to turn a part-time job into an 80-hour work week. Because I'm neurotic. I found myself AWL (always writing lectures). If I was reading the newspaper on the sofa, I would stumble across something that related to my class. I would run upstairs to write it up for the next day's lecture. Or I might fine a good chart, so I would run upstairs to rip it off for a powerpoint slide. I never turned it off. I was also busy writing papers and doing research -- activities that I didn't get paid for.

So, it's really better if I channel my insanity into projects that are appreciated and compensated. I'm not sure that I've accomplished either goal.

I'm putting a lot more time into the kids in the past year. I'm more patient with homework, and I'm not losing my mind with stress during all the school closings. Do the kids notice? Probably not. I'm cooking better food. Hubby appreciates it, but the kids miss the days of chicken nuggets. I'm writing a lot, but I have to be better about finishing projects and sending them out for review. (My goal for the day is one pitch letter.) So little compensation there.

But there is appreciation and compensation of a different sort.

I appreciate the fact that I'm no longer doing all the parenting, the housework, and the job any more. I would have liked to do everything, but it wasn't possible. I was seriously stressed out, because we just couldn't handle two high stress jobs and two kids. I never made much money in the past, so we're aren't missing the income much. I'm creating a new lifestyle for myself, and it suits me better.

I'm not getting compensated financially, but I'm compensated with time to think, experiment, socialize, and read.

It took a while for me to get to this point. At first, I was pissed off at the world for creating such a lousy job market. I was pissed off at myself for squandering all that time in dusty libraries. I deferred gratification for years with the hopes of a big payoff. I gambled and lost. I also felt guilty for letting down the sisterhood by leaving the workplace.

I got over it. Every day, I find fresh things to remind me that I'm lucky. Like the Baker Creek Heirloom seed catalog that arrived this weekend. Pictures to follow.