Good news, bad news: Sept. 22-29

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

No longer for scholars' eyes only, the Dead Sea Scrolls are posted online. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

Steps in the right direction

The king of Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote, acknowledging they can make “correct opinions.” This in a place where females can’t travel without a male’s permission, and where one woman who drove, despite a ban, was sentenced to 10 lashes. King Abdullah’s decision also permits females to run for Shura Council. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has approved draft regulations allowing women’s shelters to remain independent from government, and receive donations without state intermediation.

Weird science

It was an exciting week in space news: NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, deployed by the space shuttle in 1991, fell from orbit. A troublemaker on Twitter, armed with some Orson Welles quotes, managed to spread rumours worldwide that UARS had fallen near Okotoks, Alta. Fortunately, it appears the satellite crashed harmlessly somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A few days earlier, space geeks were titillated with another report: physicists think they saw neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, which, if confirmed, would disprove Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

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Are Fiat’s new ads about its cars or Jennifer Lopez?

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

Chrysler Group

In the latest commercial for Italian carmaker Fiat, Jennifer Lopez cruises the streets in a cream-coloured Fiat 500 Cabrio convertible, dressed impeccably, while a mob of fans chases after her (whether they’re after Lopez or her car isn’t clear). Fiat couldn’t have picked a higher-watt star for their new ad campaign—with her recent divorce, Vanity Fair cover story, a new album out, and a recurring gig on American Idol, Lopez’s career is hotter than ever. But some observers worry Fiat’s ad campaign will alienate men, the auto industry’s traditional target consumers.

On Fiat U.S.A.’s Facebook page, some reviews have been scathing, with one commenter saying the ads risk turning the Cabrio into a “girls’ car.” Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Some reports suggest that, since the recession, more women are buying sports cars. As for Lopez, she’s got a new single to promote, which blares in the commercial’s background.

Wal-Mart’s friendly face

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty Images

As the world’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is no stranger to public scrutiny. And with sales slumping in its key U.S. market, the company has been keen to burnish its image on a wide range of social issues. Case in point: executives last week revealed they were going to double the amount of money Wal-Mart spends with women-owned businesses in the United States to about US$5 billion annually, by 2016. The changes come just as the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a big sex-discrimination lawsuit against the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer, although suits from individual women could still be forthcoming. Wal-Mart has similarly worked with U.S. first lady Michelle Obama to try to promote healthier lifestyles among Americans by stocking more nutritious foods. Such efforts are no doubt made with Wal-Mart’s bottom line firmly in mind. But with annual sales greater than the GDP of 174 countries, there’s no question the rest of us benefit too.

Women don’t have to push so much

By Kate Fillion - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 10 Comments

Photography by Jean-Marc Giboux/Getty Images

Dr. Aaron Caughey is the chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Oregon Health and Sciences University, director of its Center for Women’s Health, and a researcher with an interest in diabetes in pregnancy. He recently addressed the pushing question at the Birth World Congress in Chicago.

Q: What attracted you to obstetrics?

A: I’m a labour-floor junkie. As a third-year medical student doing an obstetrics rotation, it was immediate for me, like a crush. The process of birth, the intensity of the experience, the potential for it to be many people’s best days mixed with a small percentage of people’s worst days, and the challenge of how to make the outcomes better—it’s extremely compelling.

Q: Let’s start with a brief refresher course on labour.

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Giving testosterone a workout

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Ian Gavan/Getty Images

On Jane Fonda’s recent media blitz to promote her new book, Prime Time, the 73-year-old looked radiant. She attributed her glow to the fact that she’s having great sex in her seventies—thanks partly, she said, to the testosterone she’s been taking. As Fonda gushed about the virtues of using the hormone in a “gel, pill or patch” as a libido enhancer, some experts were horrified. “Jane looks great,” says Gloria Gutman, a gerontology expert at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. “However, if she is doing it by juicing herself up on testosterone, that is scary.”

Scary or not, Fonda isn’t the only star talking about hormones. Suzanne Somers devotes a whole page on her website to it, and Sylvester Stallone has revealed he’s taken human growth hormone and testosterone to bulk up. The value of these treatments is hotly debated. Women on testosterone can experience side effects like hair growth and male-pattern baldness, oily skin, a deepening voice, and even enlargement of the clitoris. (Fonda went off it during her book tour because it was giving her acne.) Gutman and others argue the long-term effects aren’t really understood. But these hormonal treatments are more in demand than ever.

Testosterone is typically considered the “male” hormone, but womens’ bodies produce it too; it affects everything from muscle mass and bone density to libido. About 12 per cent of women aged 50 to 59 suffer “frequently” from problems with desire, says Dr. James A. Simon, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University, and half say it causes them “some kind of distress.” In 2004, Simon led a study to see whether an experimental testosterone patch could enhance the sex drive of women who’d undergone surgical menopause, where the uterus and both ovaries are removed. These women saw one or two additional episodes of sexual activity a month. “It doesn’t sound like very much,” says Simon, but it was a 74 per cent increase over the average.

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Are home births safe?

By Danielle Bochove - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 174 Comments

Photo: Jon Lowenstein/Noor/Redux

Jon Barrett is accustomed to dealing with anxious mothers-to-be. As chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, one of the main concerns he hears from patients involves unnecessary medical interventions during delivery.

He acknowledges that the rate of Caesarian sections and episiotomies is far too high in Canadian hospitals. “A healthy young woman, coming into this hospital now for delivery, has almost a 40 per cent chance of having some sort of intervention that is not desired.” But he’s more unnerved by what that phenomenon appears to be triggering: a surge in demand for home births.

In Ontario, midwives performed 2,360 home births in fiscal 2008, an increase of 23 per cent in just five years. There are no national home birth statistics but the percentage of non-hospital births more than tripled in Canada between 1991 and 2007 (the latest year for which statistics are available), although they remain well under two per cent of total births. That rate is typical of much of Western Europe and the U.S.; the notable exception is the Netherlands, where roughly a third of women give birth at home.

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The next frontier for beer: women

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

With beer consumption falling for seven straight years and neighbourhood pubs closing at a rate of 29 per week, traditionally suds-soaked Britain is facing a beverage identity crisis while brewers are left scrambling to find new markets for their products. And at least one, Molson Coors Brewing Co., believes it has found the answer: women.

Molson Coors, the company that resulted from the merger of the storied Canadian brewer and Coors Brewing Co. in 2005, is rolling out a new brand in the U.K. and Ireland called Animée, aimed directly at the fairer sex, which currently accounts for just 17 per cent of beer sales there. Described as “lightly sparkling and finely filtered with a delicious fresh taste,” Animée contains four per cent alcohol by volume and comes in three flavours: “clear filtered, crisp rosé and zesty lemon.”

“We are way behind almost every other beer drinking country in the world when it comes to women,” says Kristy McReady, a spokesperson for Molson Coors in Britain, noting that 79 per cent of women in the U.K. say they never, or rarely, drink beer—in part because it’s viewed as being high in calories. “Beer is seen as very masculine, the way it’s marketed and sold. It’s drank from pint glasses and sold in big boxes.”

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How Dutch women got to be the happiest in the world

By Claire Ward - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 73 Comments

Photo by: Thomas Schlijper

Like many Dutch women, Marie-Louise van Haeren views herself as liberated. “Every woman in Holland can do whatever she wants with her life,” says Van Haeren, 52, who lives just outside of Rotterdam and rides her bicycle or the train to work three days a week at a police academy, where she counsels students. She has worked part-time her entire career, as have almost all of her friends—married or unmarried, kids or no kids—save one or two who logged more hours out of financial necessity. Van Haeren, who wasn’t married until last year and has no children, says she’s worked part-time “to have time to do things that matter to me, live the way I want. To stay mentally and physically healthy and happy.”

Many women in the Netherlands seem to share similar views, valuing independence over success in the workplace. In 2001, nearly 60 per cent of working Dutch women were employed part-time, compared to just 20 per cent of Canadian women. Today, the number is even higher, hovering around 75 per cent. Some, like Van Haeren, view this as progress, evidence of personal freedom and a commitment to a balanced lifestyle.

Others, however, view it as an alarming signal that women are no longer seeking equality in the workplace. Writer and economist Heleen Mees, for example, argues that the stereotypical Dutch woman has become complacent. “Even at the University of Amsterdam—the most progressive university we have—I had a 22-year-old student say, ‘Why is it your business if my wife wants to bake cookies?’ and the female students agreed with him! I was like, what’s happening here?”

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Sisters with a vision

By Sally Armstrong - Monday, June 6, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 2 Comments

Photographs by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, and an increasingly skeptical international community looks to the future of Afghanistan with one eye on the exit, the women of this war-weary country have something to say to those who answered their clarion call for help a decade ago. They claim that finding the finish line requires a rebooting of the original plan that focuses on human rights and education. That plan requires security. The Afghan army and police force are not yet ready to provide it. And so, as far as the women are concerned, the coming adieu to Canada’s military, which will withdraw from its combat role in July, is bittersweet.

While news from Afghanistan has focused mostly on the insurgency taking place in the four southern provinces, the other 30 provinces are marginally better off. Much has changed. Almost three million girls are back in school, women are back at work, 40 per cent of the media are women and 25 per cent of regional councillors are female. What’s more, the fundamentalist mentality is changing. Only a few women in urban centres still wear a burka. Religious doctrines are slightly less oppressive. The constitution demands that 25 per cent of seats in the parliament are reserved for women. Says Shinkai Karokhail, 49, a long-time women’s activist and member of parliament for Kabul: “It’s the presence of countries like Canada that have made that happen. It has given me the right to speak out and to claim my space. The international community is like a thousand eyes on the government. Even the warlords are more gentle, knowing they’re being watched.”

Her concern, which is shared by most of the women in this country, is that if the international community pulls out, the gains women have made will be wrenched away. Karokhail’s colleague Fawzia Koofi, 35, a sassy, media-savvy MP from Badakhshan province who has ambitions to run in the next presidential election, puts it more bluntly. “You’re leaving before putting an end to the war,” she says. “We can’t function yet as a government. Do you think Afghanistan won’t change back after you leave? Terrorism doesn’t know borders. Your border could be next. You need to wait until we have an effective government and a qualified army and police force.”

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India's female population is dwindling at an alarming rate

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, June 6, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images

When it comes to girls, China gets the bad rap. But it’s not the only country with an overwhelming preference for boys. The 2011 Indian census revealed that there are 7.1 million fewer girls than boys aged under seven. The sex ratio in that age group is now 914 girls to 1,000 boys, the lowest since records began in 1961. And a study released last week concluded the growing gender imbalance is a result of selective abortion of female fetuses.

The study found that selective abortion of Indian girls, especially for pregnancies after a first-born girl, has increased substantially over the past 10 years. It used to be that the phenomenon was restricted to a few northern Indian states, but it is now common throughout India’s population. Prabhat Jha, a University of Toronto professor and author of the study, says the abortions are consistent with the country’s economic development: as fertility drops and a preference for sons continues, families with the means to select the gender of their child will do so. Jha says the repercussions of the skewed ratio are glaring. “In the hardest hit places of India, they’re importing brides,” he says. “There just aren’t enough women.”

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Women's afternoon TV: RIP

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 23 Comments

REUTERS/Keith Bedford

“When you think of daytime TV,” says Wesley Hyatt, author of The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television, “do you think of anything else besides talk shows, soaps and game shows?” Well, you might have to. The big hit shows that defined afternoon viewing will soon be gone forever. Most game shows bit the dust years ago, and now the other pillars are falling: The Oprah Winfrey Show is airing its final episode on May 25, and soon after, ABC will cancel two of the last soap operas, All My Children and One Life To Live. Hyatt told Maclean’s that shows like these “were dirt cheap to produce and generated enormous profits” in their heyday, but that heyday “ended around 20 years ago.” The afternoon show—providing emotional conversations or soap antics, aimed largely at stay-at-home women—has been huge since the beginning of TV, and on radio before that. Now it may be going the way of variety shows, VCRs and the Liberal party.

Of all the things threatening to tear the daytime world apart, the end of The Oprah Winfrey Show is arguably the most damaging. It means not only the end of a successful show but the end of what Hyatt calls “a pop culture phenomenon, one of the biggest events not just of TV but mass media.” Advertisers on her finale are being charged $1 million per 30-second commercial, the highest rate for a series finale since Everybody Loves Raymond in 2005. And Oprah has the kind of worshipful fan base that’s usually more associated with pop stars than TV celebrities. Tanya Lee, a Toronto woman, got into the news last December by starting an unsuccessful Facebook campaign to bring Oprah to Canada, even trying to get in touch with President Barack Obama: “Canadian Oprah fans,” she says, “I worked very hard on your behalf. Even though it did not work out, at least you know that I failed miserably.”

The only person left who has that kind of power is Judy Sheindlin of Judge Judy, who recently beat Oprah for the title of most-watched daytime personality, and who just signed a new contract to continue through 2015. But Judge Judy was launched in 1996, and no one else has come along who can step in once she leaves. As Hyatt points out, “there have been people proclaimed to be ‘the next Oprah’ going back to the 1990s, such as Ricki Lake. They never turned out that way. As much as I admire Katie Couric,” who is considering doing a daytime talk show after stepping down from CBS News, “she’s not going to be that person.”

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Why does 'American Idol' hate women?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 8 Comments

Michael Becker/FOX

When Pia Toscano was eliminated by the voters on the April 7 episode of American Idol, all the judges looked and sounded shocked. But why? The last few years of Idol should have shown that a female singer won’t get far. While the early years produced such winners as Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, the last three champs were men. Only one woman, Crystal Bowersox, made it to the final round in those three years. And this season’s finals eliminated five women in a row before finally voting out the first man. After Toscano departed, Jennifer Lopez admitted that she was afraid to criticize the two remaining females: “I feel like all of the girls are getting voted off, and I don’t like that.”

There have always been arguments about bias on Idol; until Lee DeWyze won last year, there were rumours that the show was biased toward southerners. But this season has turned the voters’ alleged anti-woman bias into a major issue. Deadline.com TV reporter Nellie Andreeva, who rarely expresses personal opinions, made an exception and asked, “Why are Idol female singers vanishing?” arguing that “the voting is so heavily skewed in the male singers’ favour that the voting results can’t possibly be random.” A report by The Today Show put it more bluntly: “Sorry, ladies. Idol’s just not that into you.”

Democracy is rarely pretty, so the first step in the anti-Idol backlash was to blame the people. More women than men watch American Idol—the show is especially popular with young women—and now that online voting is available on the show, they’re free to flood the system with votes in support of the boys they love most. Thia Megla, one of the women who was eliminated early on, said in a press conference that, “We sort of figured since there were more females watching this show the votes were going to be more for the guys.” Another eliminated woman, Naima Adedapo, accused her fellow females of voting for sex appeal instead of talent. “When it comes down to it,” she told the Hollywood Reporter, “the reality is that more than 50 per cent of the audience is little teenage girls, and once they get a crush, we’re done.”

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Is 30 per cent representation the new gender-equality dream?

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 at 9:48 AM - 10 Comments

Paul Yeung/Reuters

In February, Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann created a firestorm with his remark that more women on corporate boards would make life “more colourful and prettier.” Certainly it would at Ackermann’s bank, Germany’s biggest, whose 12-member executive committee is entirely male. Editorialists and bloggers around the globe slammed the banker for his sexist barb. Less discussed was the serious debate that inspired it: proposed quotas in the German Bundestag that would require the country’s largest publicly traded companies to fill at least 40 per cent of their management and supervisory boards with women, up from a current 8.6 per cent.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has filled one-third of her ministerial positions with women, quashed the proposal. Instead, she offered companies “one last chance” to redress the issue before she imposed legislation. Ackermann’s comment, at least according to his PR people, was intended to support that idea; he was trying to highlight the bank’s achievement of filling 16.5 per cent of management positions with women.

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Ken Finkleman doesn't 'get' women

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 14, 2011 at 10:41 AM - 4 Comments

HBO Canada

Ken Finkleman says he’s “terrible at writing women. I should not be allowed to do it.” So why is Good Dog, the newest series from Canada’s most famous TV creator-star (The Newsroom), about his relationship with a woman—and not just any woman, but one half his age? The pilot, which aired on the Movie Network last Sunday, seemed like another of Finkleman’s reality-TV parodies, as his character, George, is forced to move in with his beautiful young girlfriend (Lauren Lee Smith) by a network that’s making a reality show about his life. In the episodes to come, though, the show plot goes by the wayside, and the show becomes something fairly new: a Finkleman show about relationships. If we thought it was awkward to see Finkleman satirize the world of news and media, wait until we see him try to deal with what he calls “a social situation with this woman.”

Finkleman has hardly ignored women in his previous work. The Newsroom featured a lot of scenes for the long-suffering TV producer Karen (Karen Hines), and another series, Married Life, made a young woman a sympathetic character in yet another satire of reality shows. But the women were often overshadowed by the large cast of lunatics played by Finkleman and other actors. This may be because, as Finkleman explains, he has trouble getting inside the heads of female characters: “I can see only how they react to me. I can describe how they look, how they sit, how they dress, tons of things. But only on the surface. My perception stops there.”

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The busy woman's anti-book club

By Sarah Lazarovic - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

It began as a joke. I resented my husband’s book club and its ability to work through doorstoppers like Matterhorn (597 pages) with surprising alacrity, parsing narrative threads while making wild-game chili. Attempting to fashion a rival club, I found my girlfriends fell into two camps: the book-club-fatigued and the time-crunched. Whereas my mom can juggle two book clubs and seven novels on her Kindle, I can barely get through the ingredients list on my jar of peanut butter, with work, a baby and a Twitter feed all clamouring for my attention. And so I convened the Ladies Short-Form Media Auxiliary. We would drink buttery whites, eat cake and discuss magazine articles, YouTube clips and clever tweets. We’d all be on the same page, but that page wouldn’t be in a book.

Book clubs have seen their popularity rise and taper over the past decade. In the early part of the 20th century they enabled women, relegated to the home and often denied formal education, the chance to broaden their minds. Instead of reading the same book, women would read whatever they could get their hands on and then deliver detailed reports to their literature groups, writes Elizabeth Long in Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life.

If the role of the book club as a tool for female empowerment and education has waned over the century, its promise as a place for spirited discussion and intellectual engagement hasn’t, especially as women’s time has grown increasingly fractured. “If you don’t have a lot of leisure time, don’t have time to think interesting thoughts and talk about interesting things with people, then you really miss that,” says Long.

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Why the 'price of sex' is at an all-time low

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 35 Comments

When it comes to having a career and education, women have more opportunity than ever. But their chances of finding a stable, long-term relationship have actually declined, argues Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. In his new book, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying (co-authored with Jeremy Uecker), he says that the “price of sex” is at an all-time low.

Q: What do you mean by the “price of sex”?

A: Sex is, at bottom, an exchange between a man and a woman. One can use this exchange in [homosexual] relationships, but I didn’t go there; it would double the size of the book. It’s not a simple pleasure-for-pleasure exchange: men and women tend to seek different things from the act of sex. They often mean different things by it. This isn’t to suggest that women don’t like sex or that they don’t gain pleasure from it. We know that they do, but there’s more to it than that. Women tend to prefer sex that comes with commitment, attention, conversation, love and, sometimes, material gifts. As the price of sex diminishes, that commitment becomes harder to get.

Q: What’s driving down the price of sex?

A: Part of the story is women’s success: they make up the majority of college students today. When you look at the college campus, 57 per cent of American college students are women. In Canada, it’s comparable. And that’s a big imbalance.

Q: You argue that when women outnumber men on campus, it gives men more power to dictate the terms of sex. Your book notes that virginity, for example, is more common on campuses where men outnumber women.

A: Isn’t that interesting? When men outnumber women, women tend to get more commitment in exchange for sex. And women tend to like to marry someone of a comparable education status. But I don’t know how that’s going to happen 10 or 15 years from now. If the college imbalance remains stable, there will be a large oversupply of college-educated women interested in marriage, and there won’t be enough college-educated men. So they’ll have to marry down, and I know some who have. It’s not that it can’t work, but it is a little bit different.

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Ms. President

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 1 Comment

Chris Bolin Photography, Photograph by Andrew Tolson

When Elizabeth Cannon showed up for her first day of engineering school in 1979, women made up five per cent of the program. Now, as she takes the reins of the University of Calgary, women make up 23 per cent of the school’s future engineers and more than half of the university’s student population, a trend reflected in schools across Canada.

But as Canadians fret over the feminization of lecture halls and ponder affirmative action for males, they seem to have missed the fact that the number of women sitting in the president’s chairs remains stubbornly low. In the fall of 2000, 12 of the 68 leaders of Canadian universities—18 per cent—were female. A decade later, just 13 of 70—19 per cent—are women. The U.S. saw a similar rise and plateau: in 1986, women made up nine per cent of university and college heads; the number grew to 19 per cent in 1998 before growth stalled again, settling at just 23 per cent today. Female professors are being hired in almost equal numbers to men—45 per cent of new full-time teaching positions were awarded to women in 2008—but the upper ranks are still overwhelmingly male. Just 22 per cent of full-time professors are women, although they make up a majority of education departments and nearly half of arts teachers.

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Evolution favours shorter and heavier women—like it or not

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 72 Comments

Photograph by Hans Neleman/ Getty

What might our granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter look like? Shorter and stouter, says a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If current trends continue, its authors predict, then by 2409 descendants of the women in the study will have evolved to be one kilogram heavier and two centimetres shorter than their 2010 foremothers.

For years, some scientists heralded the end of human evolution. The post-industrial homo sapiens, they argued, was free of the kinds of “survival-of-the-fittest” pressures that could drive large-scale genetic change. In 2008, Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, gave a much-hyped lecture entitled “Human Evolution is Over.” “Not so,” says Stephen Stearns, co-author of this latest study, professor of evolutionary biology at Yale University, and founding editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. “The basic take-home is that humans continue to evolve,” Stearns told Maclean’s.

“One [could express] the result as: women are going to get shorter and fatter,” he explains. But he prefers a different bent: “There is natural selection against women being slender.” Stearns’s work shows that plumper, shorter women tend to bear more children—who carry on those same traits. His analysis drew on data from the Framingham Heart Study: a survey, begun in 1948, that collected medical information from 5,209 subjects, and monitored them and their offspring for 60 years.

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They want to be, under the sea

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by George Ruhe/Associated Press

For as long as the U.S. Navy has had submarines, women have been banned from serving on them. Now, it looks like one of the last great bastions of U.S. military discrimination will fall. Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote a letter to Congress, detailing his intention to phase in women’s submarine service.

Though women have been serving on navy warships since 1993—they make up 15 per cent of navy personnel—the navy’s 71 in-service submarines have always been off limits. Many have defended that gentlemen-only code. Some voiced concern that because of the notoriously close quarters, women would arouse underwater sexual tensions. Others made economic arguments, claiming it would be too expensive to retrofit subs with co-ed facilities. Elaine Donnelly served on a 1992 presidential commission on the issue. She has explained: “The passages are such that it would be impossible to pass without touching.” Donnelly also cited poor air quality aboard subs, which she says could pose a risk to the embryos of pregnant women.

Today, those views are being pushed aside by some loud voices—like that of Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who thinks “women ought to have full career choices for a range of careers in the navy and that includes serving on submarines.” Indeed, the submarine issue has become part of a broader reassessment of women’s combat roles. “I think it’s time,” said Gen. George Casey last month, “that we take a look at what women are actually doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. And then we look at our policies.”

Assuming that Congress does not object, vessels will soon be modified to include separate women’s quarters. It is expected to be about a year before the first female reports for submarine duty.

Ahoy, matey!

Head of the household

By Rachel Mendleson - Monday, March 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 14 Comments

Photograph by Yvonne Berg

The past few years have been difficult for Brian and Karen Rae. After working at K Tool & Die for more than a decade, Brian, 62, was laid off from the Oakville, Ont., plant, which made parts for the auto industry, in December 2008. At the time, Brian, who had been a toolmaker for 38 years, was earning about $58,000—a decent salary, he says, but not enough to live comfortably. “You can’t make it on one family income anymore.” As such, Karen has long worked full-time at Zellers, where she earns less than $20,000 a year assisting customers in the men’s department. The importance of her job has been “brought to the forefront” since he lost his, says Brian, along with the fact that surviving on it alone is impossible. While he completes a government-funded course in home renovation (he gave up on toolmaking after distributing 100 resumés to no avail), they’ve had to dip into their RRSPs. “It’s been a bit of a struggle to keep up with everything,” he says.

As Ottawa celebrates the country’s official return to economic growth, the Raes are not the only ones for whom recovery remains an abstract notion. Dubbed the “man-cession” or “he-session” for the way in which it snuffed out male-dominated manufacturing jobs, the downturn has dramatically altered the dynamic of many working class families. According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, men suffered 76 per cent of the overall job losses; Statistics Canada numbers show that in 2009, male employment levels dipped by a total of 249,000 over the previous year, compared to a decline of 28,000 for women.

The reality today is that a middle class existence, more often than not, means a two-income family, with more women assuming the role of primary breadwinner than ever before. But a stubborn fact, buried under decades of gender equality and diversity training, has resurfaced: despite comprising more than half the workforce and outpacing the educational achievements of men, women still make less. What’s happened since the recession, says Barb Byers, executive vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress, “is the men have looked [at what their wives are earning] and said, ‘Wait a minute, these are really crappy jobs. You can’t feed a family on this.’ ” It’s a reality that, when combined with the downturn and the shrinking middle class, is wreaking havoc on family finances.

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Sex and performance anxiety

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, February 26, 2010 at 3:19 PM - 51 Comments

As absolutely everyone has noted, 80% of the medals for Canada thus far in the games have been won by women – a pattern seen in previous games as well. How to explain this? Canadian Olympic Committee chief Chris Rudge, no fool he, gives the safe, media-friendly answer:

Chris Rudge, chief executive officer of the Canadian Olympic Committee, said there was no simple answer to the question of why women do better at the Games – although he suggested that women could have an inherent advantage in dealing with high-pressure elite athletics.

He said the organization plans to study the issue of the gender split in medals after the Vancouver Olympics.

“The best explanation is that women did better,” he said. “We haven’t sort of done the post-game analysis yet. So when we do, maybe we’ll have an explanation as to were the women better prepared? Were they genetically better-wired to handle pressure? I don’t have those answers, but we’ll do that after the Games.”

I am trying to imagine the fate of the official who speculated that men were “genetically better-wired to handle pressure,” or anything else for that matter. More to the point, it’s a completely idiotic explanation. The Canadian women who “handled pressure” better weren’t competing with men: they beat other women from other countries, who presumably weren’t so well-wired, pressure-handlingwise.

For a contrasting view, we go to Clara Hughes, multiple medal-winner in both Summer and Winter Games, perhaps Canada’s greatest Olympian ever. Also a woman, and therefore not so inclined to dive into the nearest politically-correct foxhole when the subject of gender comes up:

Clara Hughes, Canada’s best-known female athlete, said Thursday that the success of Canadian women should be celebrated, but that direct comparisons between men and women’s events are problematic.

“Sport at this level is unfathomably hard, but it’s different,” said Ms. Hughes, who won her sixth Olympic medal, a bronze, on Wednesday.

She said the field of play is typically more crowded for men, making it tougher for them to get enough resources to compete properly. “It takes a lot more resources to be able to develop men to the level as women in many sports.”

Ms. Hughes, who has won medals in the Winter and Summer Olympics, said men’s fields are often deeper in sports like cycling, speed skating and cross-country skiing.

“When you get a top 10 result as a male, it’s unbelievable. It’s out of this world,” she said. “I’m not saying it’s easier to win as a female. But in terms of depth, it’s different.”

… Hughes said religion, culture and custom in many countries limit opportunities for women in sports.

“There are countries in this world that do not allow their females to even participate in sports let alone be supported,” she said. “I’ve never been in a country and felt the support that I’ve felt in Canada. It’s just unconditional and I’ve always felt that Canadians celebrate success whether it’s a guy or a girl.”

We should note that although female athletes made up 43% of the Olympic team, they received fully half the funding. In other words, although it costs less, according to Hughes, to produce a world-class female athlete than a male, we give them more funding per capita.

Which poses a conundrum. If winning medals is the sole objective, then perhaps we should give even more of the funding to women: that would be the most efficient allocation, after all, in terms of dollars per medal. But if gender parity is the goal, that would argue in favour of giving a greater share of the funding to the men, since it costs more to produce a male athlete of comparable competitiveness: men have, as it were, special needs.

Cat, meet pigeons.

Wendy Mesley come on down

By Sharon Dunn - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 1:03 PM - 15 Comments

It was 1976, and I had just been hired as a television news anchor and staff announcer at CBC’s Halifax station. Only 22 years old, I had been put through a complicated audition process beforehand—anchoring both the six and 11 o’clock news, including at-the-board weather and interviews, then turning around the very next day to host early-morning radio at 6 a.m., and the afternoon show at 4 p.m., before racing back to the TV studio to anchor the six and 11 o’clock newscasts all over again. Over a 24-hour period, I was a one-woman band—all a test to see if a woman could keep up to the “rigours of the job,” as management put it, something I suspect a male announcer had never been asked to do. It seemed to be a set-up to ensure I’d fail, but when I refused to be reduced to a withering heap on the floor, the bewildered CBC bosses reluctantly confirmed my position on staff, and my trial period was over. I had made it—the first-ever female CBC staff announcer in the Atlantic provinces. (By that time, Jan Tennant had held the distinction in Toronto for five years.)

I was a pioneer, and pioneering was not to be easy. Criticism abounded from within the ranks: male announcers were aghast, managers were still leery, even some female employees expressed their displeasure (“women shouldn’t be reading the news”; “they aren’t credible”; “their voices are too shrill”). This was a time when the only shows women hosted were afternoon-tea-type programs about flowers and food and arts and crafts—shows I abhorred. The most widely held belief, even among those who begrudgingly accepted my appointment, was that my time in TV would definitely be short-lived—women anchors would surely be out of a job as they aged, well before they reached 40.

Four years later, when I moved to Toronto to anchor CBC’s flagship 6 o’clock TV news, I realized things weren’t much better when one Toronto manager told me that women shouldn’t be anchors because “men become credible as they age and women just get old.”

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The birth of Botox feminism

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 2 Comments

When U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid proposed a five per cent levy on elective cosmetic surgeries and procedures to help fund the US$848-billion Senate health care bill last month, a Robin Hood-style logic appeared to be at work: let those who can afford Botox or facelifts subsidize low- to middle-income citizens currently without health care to the tune of US$6 billion over 10 years. What he didn’t foresee was that those very low- to middle-income Americans would take to the streets to protest the so-called “Bo-tax” as an infringement of a perceived enshrined right to smooth foreheads and surgically enhanced breasts.

“Washington leave our boobs alone” read a placard at a rally in New York’s Times Square organized by a Park Avenue cosmetic surgeon. “The tax directly affects me,” Irma Cadiz, a 33-year-old hairstylist saving for a US$7,000 tummy tuck, told the New York Daily News. “If I have a heart attack, will they tax that, too?” she asked, revealing how conflated elective cosmetic procedures have become with necessary medical intervention. Opposition to the Bo-tax from the American Medical Association further muddled the matter. As did its denunciation by the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest feminist lobby in the U.S. NOW’s president Terry O’Neill argued the Bo-tax unfairly targeted women, who comprise 90 per cent of cosmetic surgery recipients—especially middle-aged women facing workplace discrimination who rely on sometimes risky cosmetic procedures to “freshen” their image.

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A co-ed school in Saudi Arabia

By Michael Barclay - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Education in Saudi Arabia used to be strictly segregated along gender lines. That’s all changed with the opening last month of the kingdom’s first co-ed university—the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Not only will women be able to study and work alongside men, they won’t be required to wear veils and will be permitted to drive cars—both serious no-nos for all other Saudi women.

It’s a bold move in Saudi Arabia, where the status of women has often been described as akin to apartheid. KAUST exists outside the education ministry—it’s run by Aramco, the state oil company, which invested $10 billion in its construction. The university is part of King Abdullah’s plan to diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil, and to create new opportunities for the large Saudi youth population (more than half of the population is under 25). To do this, KAUST could be considered a trial balloon to expand women’s education. Continue…