New Study Reveals “Double Jeopardy” Faced by Women of Color in STEM

This report examines whether the four distinct patterns of gender bias that have been documented in experimental social psychologists’ labs reflect what is actually occurring at work for women in the STEM fields, and particularly for women of color. The study documented by this report shows that gender bias exists, and it exists for women of color: 100% of the scientists interviewed reported encountering gender bias at work.

It is understood that women of color face “double jeopardy” because they encounter race as well as gender bias. Much less discussed is that women of color often experience gender bias in ways that differ significantly by race. This study explores how the experience of gender bias differs by race. The report also introduces a new approach to organizational change to interrupt gender bias, called Metrics-Based Bias Interrupters.

Source: Hastings School of Law, University of California

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Special Collection on Women’s Heart Health

For American Heart Month 2015, the editorial team at Women’s Health Issues has assembled a special collection of research on women’s cardiovascular health published in the journal since mid-2011, following the release of updated American Heart Association guidelines on the prevention of cardiovascular disease in women. The articles address healthcare services for women at risk for cardiovascular disease; social determinants of health; and physical activity in specific populations of women.

 These articles will be accessible for free during the month of February 2015 so that they are available to a wider interested audience.

Source: Women's Health Issues

Link to collection of articles.

Highlights of women’s earnings in 2013

From the introduction:

 In 2013, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings of $706. On average in 2013, women made 82 percent of the median weekly earnings of male full-time wage and salary workers ($860). In 1979, the first year for which comparable earnings data are available, women earned 62 percent of what men earned. This report presents earnings data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a national monthly survey of approximately 60,000 households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Information on earnings is collected from one-fourth of the CPS sample each month. It is important to note that the comparisons of earnings in this report are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be significant in explaining earnings differences. See the accompanying technical notes section for more information, including a description of the source of the data and an explanation of the concepts and definitions used in this report.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Rape and Sexual Assault Among College-age Females, 1995-2013

Description:

Compares the characteristics of rape and sexual assault victimization against females ages 18 to 24 who are enrolled and not enrolled in college. This report examines the relationship between the victim and offender, the involvement of a weapon, location of the victimization, reporting to police, perceived offender characteristics, and victim demographics. Data are from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which collects information on nonfatal crimes, reported and not reported to the police, against persons from a nationally representative sample of U.S. households. The report also discusses methodological differences between the NCVS and other surveys that measure rape and sexual assault victimization and the impact of these difference on rape and sexual assault estimates.

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics

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High Potentials in Tech- Intensive Industries: The Gender Divide in Business Roles

Description:

Technology-intensive industries including high tech, oil and gas, and energy have grown rapidly in the 21st century, far outstripping other industries. Companies in these industries need employees with both the technical and managerial leadership skills to ensure their success—but the pipeline is leaky.
Women make up a significant proportion of the talent pool, particularly in business roles,  which are often a pathway to the top. How can tech-intensive companies attract and retain high-potential talent from day one and hold on to them over time?
This report:

• Identifies the gender gap women experience working in business roles in tech-intensive industries from day one.
• Uncovers the barriers holding women back and provides insight into why women leave.
• Provides recommendations on how companies can reverse these trends by attracting and retaining top female talent in business roles and becoming employers of choice for women.

Source: Catalyst

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2015 Hunger Report :When Women Flourish…We Can End Hunger

From the Press Release

"...identifies the empowerment of women and girls as essential in ending hunger, extreme poverty, and malnutrition around the world and in the United States."

The report also shows that women’s willingness to share men’s breadwinning responsibilities has not been matched by men’s willingness to share unpaid household work or caregiving responsibilities. Though domestic work is a public good in the same way that education, clean water, clean air, and the food supply are, it is not recognized as such. Women constitute half the global population.

Source: Bread for the World Institute

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Ending Violence Against Women and Girls: The World’s Best Laws and Policies

From the Press Release:

At the World Future Council, we strive to bring the interests of future generations to the centre of policy-making. With our annual Future Policy Award, we highlight the world’s best solutions and we encourage policy-makers around the world to implement them.

In 2014, the Future Policy Award celebrates laws and policies that contribute to ending one of the most pervasive human rights violations: violence against women and girls. One in three women worldwide suffers some form of violence in her lifetime. By restricting women’s choices and limiting their ability to act, the persistence of violence against women has serious consequences for peace and security, economic development and poverty reduction. Thus, it hampers all efforts towards a future just society. International experts from academia, civil society and international organisations have nominated twenty-five policies from around the world which were implemented to improve the lives of women. Together, they reflect the broad scope of existing policy responses at local, national and transnational levels. 

Source: World Future Council, UN Women

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Violence against Women and Girls : Lessons from South Asia

Description:
This report documents the dynamics of violence against women in South Asia across the life cycle, from early childhood to old age. It explores the different types of violence that women may face throughout their lives, as well as the associated perpetrators (male and female), risk and protective factors for both victims and perpetrators, and interventions to address violence across all life cycle stages. The report also analyzes the societal factors that drive the primarily male — but also female — perpetrators to commit violence against women in the region. For each stage and type of violence, the report critically reviews existing research from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, supplemented by original analysis and select literature from outside the region. Policies and programs that address violence against women and girls are analyzed in order to highlight key actors and promising interventions. Finally, the report identifies critical gaps in research, program evaluations, and interventions in order to provide strategic recommendations for policy makers, civil society, and other stakeholders working to mitigate violence against women in South Asia.

Source: The World Bank

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Girls Just Wanna Not Run: The Gender Gap in Young Americans’ Political Ambition

Description:

Based on the results of a new survey of more than 2,100 college students between the ages of 18 and 25, we offer the first assessment of political ambition early in life. And our results are troubling. Young women are less likely than young men ever to have considered running for office, to express interest in a candidacy at some point in the future, or to consider elective office a desirable profession. Moreover, the size of the gender gap in political ambition we uncover among 18 – 25 year olds is comparable to the size of the gap we previously uncovered in studies of potential candidates already working in the feeder professions to politics. Our data suggest, therefore, that the gender gap in ambition is already well in place by the time women and men enter their first careers.

Source: American University School of Public Affairs

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Online Harassment, Defamation, and Hateful Speech: A Primer of the Legal Landscape

Abstract:

This interdisciplinary project focused on online speech directed at women and seeks to provide a primer on (i) what legal remedies, if any, are available for victims of sexist, misogynist, or harassing online speech, and (ii) if such legal remedies and procedures exist, whether practical hurdles stand in the way of victims’ abilities to stop harassing or defamatory behavior and to obtain legal relief. The study concluded that while online harassment and hateful speech is a significant problem, there are few legal remedies for victims. This is partly due to issues of jurisdiction and anonymity, partly due to the protection of internet speech under the First Amendment, and partly due to the lack of expertise and resources on online speech at various levels of law enforcement. Given this landscape, the problem of online harassment and hateful speech is unlikely to be solved solely by victims using existing laws; law should be utilized in combination with other practical solutions. 

The objective of the project is to provide a resource that may be used by the general public, and in particular, researchers, legal practitioners, Internet community moderators, and victims of harassment and hateful speech online.

Source: Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy Report No. 2  via SSRN

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Annual report: Women in the Labor Force: A Databook

This report presents historical and current labor force and earnings data for women from the Current Population Survey.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey

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Maternity and paternity at work: Law and practice across the world

From the Abstract:

This report provides a picture of where we stand and what we have learned so far about maternity and paternity rights across the world. It offers a rich international comparative analysis of law and practice relating to maternity protection at work in 185 countries and territories, comprising leave, cash benefits, employment protection and non-discrimination, health protection, breastfeeding arrangements at work and childcare. Expanding on previous editions, it is based on an extensive set of new legal and statistical indicators, including coverage in law and in practice of paid maternity leave as well as statutory provision of paternity and parental leave and their evolution over the last 20 years. 

Source: International Labour Organization

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Gender Pay Gaps among Highly Educated Professionals: Compensation Components Do Matter

Abstract:
Making use of panel data from a survey of highly educated professionals, gender pay gaps are explored with regard to total compensation as well as to individual compensation components. The results indicate meaningful male-female wage differentials for this quite homogeneous group of people working in one specific industry: in particular for more experienced employees in higher positions of firm hierarchies with children. Gender pay gaps are much more pronounced for bonus payments than they are for fixed salaries.

Source: Institute of Labour (IZA)

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Female Brain Drains and Women's Rights Gaps: A Gravity Model Analysis of Bilateral Migration Flows

Abstract:

In this paper we model the migration decisions of high-skilled women as a function of the benefits associated with moving from an origin with relatively low women's rights to a destination with a relatively high level of women's rights. However, the costs faced by women are decreasing in the level of women's rights provided. The model predicts a non-linear relationship between the relative levels of women's rights in destination versus origin countries (the women's rights gap) and the gender gap in high-skilled migration flows (the female brain drain ratio). In particular, starting from large values of the women's rights gap (where women's rights are very low in the origin) decreases in the gap may be associated with increases in the female brain drain ratio. However, starting from lower levels of the gap the relationship is positive: a greater gain in women's rights moving from origin to destination is, all else equal, associated with a greater likelihood of migration. Using a cross section of over 3,000 bilateral migration flows across OECD and non-OECD countries and the women's rights indices from the CIRI Human Rights Dataset, we report evidence consistent with the theory. A statistically significant and nonlinear relationship exists between women's rights gaps and female brain drain ratios. The evidence is particularly strong for the case of women's political rights. 

Source: Institute of Labour (IZA)
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Poor Black Women Are Evicted at Alarming Rates, Setting Off a Chain of Hardship

Description:
Low-income women are evicted at much higher rates than men. The reasons are varied, including lower wages and children, but one rarely discussed reason is the gender dynamics between largely male landlords and female tenants. This brief, based on an in-depth look at evictions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, finds that women’s non-confrontational approach with landlords and their tendency to dodge the issue are two reasons why women from black neighborhoods in Milwaukee represented only 9.6 percent of the population, but 30 percent of the evictions.

Source: Harvard University [via MacArthur Foundation]

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The Gender Wage Gap: 2013; Differences by Race and Ethnicity, No Growth in Real Wages for Women

Description:

The gender wage gap in the United States has not seen significant improvement in recent years, and remains a reality for women across racial and ethnic groups. In 2013, the ratio of women’s to men’s median weekly full-time earnings was 82.1 percent, an increase of more than one percentage point since 2012,when the ratio was 80.9 percent (but still slightly lower than the 2011 ratio of 82.2 percent). This corresponds to a weekly gender wage gap of 17.9 percent. Real earnings have remained largely unchanged since 2012; women’s median weekly earnings increased by $5 to $706 in 2013; men’s median weekly earnings increased to $860, a marginal increase of $7 compared with 2012.

Source:  Institute for Women's Policy Research (via Cynthia Epstein CASBS Fellow 2014, 2005, 1978)

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Read more information about Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) online

Violence against women: an EU-wide survey

Description:

This FRA survey is the first of its kind on violence against women across the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU). It is based on interviews with 42,000 women across the EU, who were asked about their experiences of physical, sexual and psychological violence, including incidents of intimate partner violence (‘domestic violence’).

Source: European Union for Fundamental Rights

Download full pdf publication: Violence against women: an EU-wide survey

Other supporting documents in a variety of languages are available from the site.

U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report on Women in scientific careers

From the Summary: 
Many attempts have been made to improve the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers in the UK. Yet currently only 17 per cent of STEM professors are women. It is astonishing that despite clear imperatives and multiple initiatives to improve diversity in STEM, women still remain under-represented at senior levels across every discipline. One compelling reason to tackle this problem is that the UK economy needs more STEM workers and we cannot meet the demand without increasing the numbers of women in STEM.
There is no single explanation for the lack of gender diversity in STEM; it is the result of perceptions and biases combined with the impracticalities of combining a career with family.  Scientists often consider themselves to be objective and unbiased, yet studies have shown that scientists are susceptible to the same biases as the rest of the population.  Therefore we have recommended that diversity and equality training should be provided to all STEM undergraduate and postgraduate students. It should also be mandatory for all members of recruitment and promotion panels and line managers.

Source:Science and Technology Committee, House of Commons, Parliament, U.K.

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New Data Released: Highlights of Women's Earnings in 2012

Introduction:

In 2012, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings of $691. On average in 2012, women made about 81 percent of the median earnings of male full-time wage and salary workers ($854). In 1979, the first year for which comparable earnings data are available, women earned 62 percent of what men earned.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Mothers, Friends and Gender Identity

Abstract:

This paper explores a novel mechanism of gender identity formation. Specifically, we explore how the work behavior of a teenager's own mother, as well as that of her friends' mothers, affect her work decisions in adulthood. The first mechanism is commonly included in economic models. The second, which in social psychology is also emphasized as an important factor in gender identity formation, has so far been overlooked. Accordingly, our key theoretical innovation is how the utility function is modeled. It is assumed that an adult woman's work decisions are influenced by her own mother's choices as well as her friends' mothers' choices when she was a teenager, and the interaction between the two. The empirical salience of this behavioral model is tested using a network model specification together with the longitudinal structure of the AddHealth data set. We find that both intergenerational channels positively affect a woman's work hours in adulthood, but the cross effect is negative, indicating the existence of cultural substitutability. That is, the mother's role model effect is larger the more distant she is (in terms of working hours) from the friends' mothers.

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

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