Center for Women’s & Gender Studies

“Sex is a right,” one woman in the audience asserted, immediately qualifying her statement, “It’s in the Qur’an.” The room was tense with impassioned Arab women, each politely struggling to be patient while anxious syllables escaped their throats. “We should be able to discuss sex without talking about religion,” another woman remarked.

The 3^rd Annual New Arab Woman Forum (NAWF) invited women from across the Middle East and North Africa to discuss the role Arab women play in politics, society, media, and education. However, the conversation always found its way back to one subject—sex. At $300 per ticket, the conference attracted an exclusive crowd of over 600 women; more notable, perhaps, were those excluded from the conference. While poverty was discussed at the forum, I do not suppose there were many poor people in attendance. A colorful version of the truth landed me an invitation as a member of the American press reporting for the University of Texas Center for Women’s and Gender Studies.

I met women from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Sudan, Bahrain, and even some European countries. However, most of the attendees were local Lebanese women. Many Americans might assume that all Arab women don a burka, wear hijab, or at least dress conservatively; to the contrary, women in Beirut are famous for their flashy fashion. Although the awkward mingling that takes place at such events later substantiated the fact that most of the attendees were Lebanese, initial clues lied in the perfect hair, doll-like make-up, stylish heels, tight skirts, and shades of red, pink, and orange nail polish that made the event look more like a fashion show than a conference. The subtleties of perfection reiterated that Lebanese beauty was not a one-day affair; instead, I got the impression of pre-prom preparation. Every detail was taken into consideration from head to toe. Of course, these observations do not address all Lebanese women, but they describe a trend that was undeniably apparent at the conference.

Lebanese women are often thought to be the most beautiful of Arab women, but this focus on beauty, which is common throughout the Arab world, leads to internal (personal) and external (societal) conflict that dominated much of the discussion at NAWF.  “Why do we compete so viciously to be beautiful?” asked panelist Fawziya Salama, Egyptian journalist and TV persona.  “To attract men? And then do what with them?” Salama described the way men in the streets make comments to women as they pass by or “birmoo kilma,” which literally translates into “ they throw a word.”  It is an impersonal exchange supported by men’s control of public spaces, and something I have become very familiar with living in Jordan. To deter this behavior, many people often repeat a common adage, “If a man makes perverse comments to women on the streets, other men will make similar comments to his sister or mother.” Salama explained such a proverb takes a male-centric approach towards what could arguably be considered sexual harassment, “this saying ignores the way women are affected by objectionable comments and focuses instead on how men feel.”

The conversation continued on into the lunch break. The consensus at my table seemed to be that sexualized images of Arab women in the media are contributing to the sexual mis-education of Arab youth. “Our culture is a culture of silence when it comes to sex,” one woman told me. “The next generation is being bombarded with sexual images and there is no one to guide them, answer questions, or even address health concerns and STDs.” Globalization is forcing the Middle East to confront and address issues related to sex and sexuality that have been traditionally contained by cultural and religious conservatism.

As NAWF came to an end, I overheard two women express their disappointment stating that nothing was accomplished at the forum. However, the conference itself was an accomplishment. I was reminded of the role that consciousness raising plays in the struggle for equality and self-actualization. I appreciated the insight the speakers had to offer, but the biggest thrill came from members of the audience. Many of these women were more than passionate; they were angry. Some women spoke with tears in their eyes, others screamed, a few even fought, and one woman spoke for way, way too long. The women in the audience were so eager to speak and to be heard in a public space with an audience of influential people.

(A special thanks to Alamo Heights Rotary Club and Rotary District 5840 for making my experience abroad possible.)

NATIONAL WOMEN’S STUDIES ASSOCIATION KEYNOTE ADDRESS,

ATLANTA GA, NOV. 12, 2009

View the Keynote address by Angela Davis: http://www.nwsa.org/conference/video2.php

By Robin Wilson

As a female professor, are you called rude and abrasive while your male colleagues who make similar statements are simply labeled assertive? Has your department head discouraged you from taking an assignment, saying that because you have children you might not be able to handle it?

If things like that have happened to you, yell: “Bingo!”

The Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law is unveiling a new online game on Thursday called Gender Bias Bingo. The game is intended for women, although men who have overheard biased statements or have faced bias because they are fathers can also play. An online bingo card names six overall categories of gender bias, like assumptions that women cannot be both good mothers and good workers. Professors who submit examples online of at least three of the types of gender bias in the workplace can declare bingo and win a T-shirt.

“We’re attempting to teach people how to recognize gender bias when it happens to them,” says Joan C. Williams, a professor of law and director of the center. “We also want to get a buzz going so other people—department chairs—will secretly visit the site to learn what’s going on.”

Ms. Williams, who has written widely about how motherhood can stymie women’s academic careers, designed the game with part of a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. She plans to unveil it at a meeting of female professors who have received NSF grants that were awarded to help change university policies and culture so that institutions hire and hang onto more female scientists and engineers.

Ms. Williams had read nearly 200 scientific studies of gender bias in academic journals and wanted a way to make the findings accessible to female professors. So she came up with four general patterns of bias, solicited examples of them from focus groups of female professors, and made it all available on a Web site, along with the bingo game.

The Web site comes with “strategies for surviving gender bias” and includes videotaped scenarios illustrating the four patterns of bias. It also offers university administrators an economic argument for stopping gender bias, which can lead women to leave universities. “It does not make economic sense, particularly in these economic conditions, to keep recruiting women and then keep driving them out,” says Ms. Williams, who points out that a start-up package for a research scientist can cost as much as $1-million. “There had never been built, as far as I could tell, a clear explanation of why it’s cheaper to keep her.”

http://chronicle.com/article/New-Game-Plays-on-Womens/48966/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

There are 600 million adolescent girls living in poverty in the developing world. By giving one of these girls a chance, you start the girl effect. When girls have safe places to meet, education, legal protection, health care, and access to training and job skills, they can thrive. And if they thrive, everyone around them thrives, too.

For more information, visit girleffect.org

View the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw

Stop Asking Me My Major By Scott Keyes

One of my best friends from high school, Andrew, changed majors during his first semester at college. He and I had been fascinated by politics for years, sharing every news story we could find and participating in the Internet activism that was exploding into a new political force. Even though he was still passionate about politics, that was no longer enough. “I have to get practical,” he messaged me one day, “think about getting a job after graduation. I mean, it’s like my mom keeps asking me: What can you do with a degree in political science anyway?”

I heard the same question from my friend Jesse when students across campus were agonizing about which major was right for them. He wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to study, but every time a field sparked his interest, his father would pepper him with questions about what jobs were available for people in that discipline. Before long, Jesse’s dad had convinced him that the only way he could get a job and be successful after college was to major in pre-med.

My friends’ experiences were not atypical.

Choosing a major is one of the most difficult things students face in college. There are two main factors that most students consider when making this decision. First is their desire to study what interests them. Second is the fear that a particular major will render them penniless after graduation and result in that dreaded postcollege possibility: moving back in with their parents.

All too often, the concern about a major’s practical prospects are pushed upon students by well-intentioned parents. If our goal is to cultivate students who are happy and successful, both in college as well as in the job market, I have this piece of advice for parents: Stop asking, “What can you do with a degree in (fill in the blank)?” You’re doing your children no favors by asking them to focus on the job prospects of different academic disciplines, rather than studying what interests them.

It is my experience, both through picking a major myself and witnessing many others endure the process, that there are three reasons why parents (and everyone else) should be encouraging students to focus on what they enjoy studying most, rather than questioning what jobs are supposedly available for different academic concentrations.

The first is psychological. For his first two years of college, Jesse followed his dad’s wishes and remained a pre-med student. The only problem was that he hated it. With no passion for the subject, his grades slipped, hindering his chances of getting into medical school. As a result his employability, the supposed reason he was studying medicine in the first place, suffered.

The second reason to stop asking students what they can do with a major is that it perpetuates the false notion that certain majors don’t prepare students for the workplace. The belief that technical majors such as computer science are more likely to lead to a job than a major such as sociology or English is certainly understandable. It’s also questionable. “The problem,” as my friend José explained to me, “is that even as a computer-science major, what I learned in the classroom was outdated by the time I hit the job market.” He thought instead that the main benefit of his education, rather than learning specific skills, was gaining a better way of thinking about the challenges he faced. “What’s more,” he told me, “no amount of education could match the specific on-the-job training I’ve received working different positions.”

Finally, it is counterproductive to demand that students justify their choice of study with potential job prospects because that ignores the lesson we were all taught in kindergarten (and shouldn’t ignore the closer we get to employment): You can grow up to be whatever you want to be. The jobs people work at often fall within the realm of their studies, but they don’t have to. One need look no further than some of the most prominent figures in our society to see illustrations. The TV chef Julia Child studied English in college. Author Michael Lewis, whose best sellers focus on sports and the financial industry, majored in art history. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, got his degree in philosophy, as did the former Hewlett Packard chief executive Carly Fiorina. Jeff Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, focused on mathematics. Indeed, with the Department of Labor estimating that on average people switch careers (not just jobs) two or three times in their lives, relying on a college major as career preparation is misguided.

I’m not saying any applicant can get any job. Job seekers still need marketable skills if they hope to be hired. However, in a rapidly changing economy, which majors lead to what jobs is not so clear cut. Many employers look for applicants from a diverse background—including my friend who has a degree in biochemistry but was just hired at an investment consulting firm.

That doesn’t mean that majors no longer matter. It is still an important decision, and students are right to seek outside counsel when figuring out what they want to study. But questioning how a particular major will affect their employability is not necessarily the best approach. Although parents’ intentions may be pure—after all, who doesn’t want to see their children succeed after graduation?—that question can hold tremendous power over impressionable freshmen. Far too many of my classmates let it steer them away from what they enjoyed studying to a major they believed would help them get a job after graduation.

One of those friends was Andrew. He opted against pursuing a degree in political science, choosing instead to study finance because “that’s where the jobs are.” Following graduation, Andrew landed at a consulting firm. I recently learned with little surprise that he hates his job and has no passion for the work.

Jesse, on the other hand, realized that if he stayed on the pre-med track, he would burn out before ever getting his degree. During his junior year he changed tracks and began to study engineering. Not only did Jesse’s grades improve markedly, but his enthusiasm for the subject recently earned him a lucrative job offer and admission to a top engineering master’s program.

Andrew and Jesse both got jobs. But who do you think feels more successful?

Scott Keyes is a 2009 graduate of Stanford University, where he majored in political science.

Still Earning Less By Mary Ann Mason

Consider a few facts: Women are now half of all workers on U.S. payrolls; there is no longer a clear timeline for marriage and childbirth; and a record 40 percent of children born in 2007 had unmarried mothers. Those figures are from a recently published study, led by Maria Shriver, called “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything.”

The study also found that nearly two-thirds of women are either the main breadwinners or co-breadwinners in their families. Nonetheless, they still earn less than men, while handling more than their fair share of caregiving responsibilities at home.

My contribution to “The Shriver Report” focused on higher education. Does it prepare women to become breadwinners? The good news is that women today receive 62 percent of associate degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, half of all professional degrees (including law and medicine), and just under half of all Ph.D.’s

Now for the bad news: Our economy is increasingly dependent on workers skilled in advanced technology, but at each education level, from K-12 onward, structural barriers discourage women from entering into the challenging, and much higher-paid, fields of science, technology, engineering, and math.

Women are diverted from such fields at each stage of their education. In K-12, girls receive less encouragement than boys in math and science. In high-school programs, they are channeled into certain service professions, like hair styling rather than computer repair. At the undergraduate level, women are clustered in education and health programs, while men dominate engineering and the physical sciences.

In graduate school, the segregation is even more pronounced, and fewer women still go on to careers in academic science. Even in professional schools like medicine, with gender parity in admissions, women are far more likely to train in the lower-paying specialties of primary care. At every level, the American educational system is failing young women by encouraging them to take a route that leads to lower pay, a route that will eventually limit them in providing for their families.

Once a woman has chosen a career, whether traditional or not, inflexible workplace policies can exacerbate gender inequalities. In higher education, if they pursue advanced degrees, such as a Ph.D., an M.D., or an M.B.A., women find that their institutions probably do not support them in starting a family even if they are in their 30s, their chief reproductive years. That discovery causes many women to turn away from their original career goals and seek less demanding career tracks.

After completing their education, whether it is a bachelor’s or a graduate degree, many women enter the work force only to find that their employers do not offer support systems that allow women and men to balance challenging career and family obligations while rising to positions of leadership and higher pay. Instead, most workplaces still maintain the structure established in the 19th century, when husbands worked full time and never had to consider taking time off to care for a family member, because they had wives at home to attend to such matters. Under that model today, workers are penalized for working less than full time, or for taking a break from their jobs to care for their families.

Even as women have increasingly become breadwinners, however, they have not abdicated their role as family caregivers. Our research shows that the second shift is alive and well in academe. From the graduate student through the faculty ranks, academic mothers routinely put in 15 or more hours a week than fathers do. Other studies show that this pattern crosses all workplaces.

As a result, women bear the brunt of antiquated work policies. Unfortunately, here in the United States, one of the few industrialized countries that does not routinely offer paid family leave, there are few workplaces, whether scientific laboratories or retail stores, that have strong incentives to create flexible family-leave policies. Denied flexibility, many women are also denied raises and promotions, with the wage gap widening as a result.

Although women have narrowed that wage gap nationally, they still earn only about 78 cents to the dollar earned by men for the same work. That average can vary widely by field. Women in sales occupations earn just 64.8 percent of men’s wages in equivalent positions. At the higher end of the wage scale, female corporate executives earn 72 cents to the dollar earned by men; female partners in law firms, 68 cents; and female doctors, 59 cents.

When compared with men’s pay at the same level of educational attainment, women’s pay is even more unequal: Women earn only 67 cents to their male counterparts’ $1. That difference remains steady at every level of education.

The discrepancy between men and women is even more skewed at the top power positions. Only 9 percent of the members of the National Academy of Science are women, only 8 percent of the nation’s top corporate managers, and only 5 percent of managing partners in large law firms. In Congress, female senators and representatives account for only 17 percent of their chambers’ membership. Without equal representation in positions of power, we as a society have less will to make the structural changes that would allow women to achieve equity in education and in the workplace.

Simply opening the door to higher education has not allowed women to achieve gender equity in the work force. Education does lead to higher incomes for women, but female breadwinners will continue to take home less than their male counterparts until educational segregation is eliminated and workplaces adopt flexible policies.

The hopeful news is that the educational system may finally be poised for change. Women now represent over 50 percent of the American work force. As women become equal in numbers and take on more leadership positions, traditional workplace policies may be revised to allow for alternate career ladders.

We have seen significant changes among institutions of higher education in the past 10 years, and many corporations have gone further. And our existing gender-equity laws, particularly Title IX, are being looked at in new ways. President Obama and others have urged equitable enforcement of Title IX as a tool to level the playing field for women in math and science, much as it has done in sports. But women themselves must realize their responsibilities and make appropriate career choices—ones that will give them breadwinner capacity.

In our studies, women rarely imagine themselves to be primary breadwinners, even when they are. The myth of the male breadwinner dies hard, but it is just a myth.

Mary Ann Mason is a professor and co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security and the author (with her daughter, Eve Ekman), of Mothers on the Fast Track. She writes regularly on work and family issues for our Balancing Act column, and invites readers to send in questions or personal concerns about those issues to careers@chronicle.com or to mamason@law.berkeley.edu.

By Mary Ann Mason
Barack Obama, in the month before his election, promised an audience of members of the Association for Women in Science and the Society of Women Engineers that he would do more to enforce Title IX, which prevents sexual discrimination in educational programs and activities receiving federal funds. He also vowed to significantly increase the number of women in science and technology.

On the 37th anniversary of Title IX, the Obama administration recommitted to women’s advancement in the sciences when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Valerie Jarrett, a White House senior adviser, issued a statement that said the law was integral “to encourage women to pursue their aspirations in fields in which they have been historically underrepresented, such as science and technology.”

More here: http://chronicle.com/article/Title-IX-Includes-Maternal/49159/

The Khede Kasra Campaign by Leo Burnett Beirut won 5 gold and 2 silver awards at the International Dubai Lynx Festival. This edit shows the work done up to March 2009.