femin bak women

oddly, no notes 5/14

===

SEE MISO 4

SEE MISOGYNY SEE MALE MANOSPHERE REVERSE GRIEVANCE DEI

anti-fem is gateway drug (eg cernovich rape charge)

SEE XIAN NAT’L

see 4chan alt right red pill BS

note devos 1st act on rape

719 bak

===

see #metoo

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an tc 7 26

A new movement, “masculinism”, is uniting the right behind extreme anti-feminist views, chiefly in the United States. It promotes the dominant role of men in society, including the idea that men should dominate women.

The movement is led by figures such as self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate (named by the New Yorker as a “singularly influential proponent of masculinism”), who has just been arrested in the US, with his brother Tristan. UK authorities have just announced new charges against the brothers related to allegations of rape and sex trafficking – adding to previous charges in the United Kingdom, and a criminal investigation underway in Romania.

Other masculinists include male supremacist podcaster Myron Gaines, white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and preacher Doug Wilson, leader of a network of 170 churches whose followers include US war secretary Pete Hegseth.

The term “masculinist” was originally coined in the late 1800s or early 1900s to refer to defenders of male domination. It was then adopted by some in the men’s rights movement in the 1980s as part of a reaction against second-wave feminism. Now, it is being widely used by manosphere and far-right figures and groups.

Masculinism is an extreme form of a men’s rights movement, which believes men should have more rights, power and opportunities than women.

Extreme ideas becoming more common

Andrew Tate has lived out these ideals in life – building an “empire of abuse” based on systemically exploiting women (whom he called “assets” he could “monetize”) for his webcam business.

Wilson was a guest pastor at the Pentagon’s monthly Christian prayer service in February, with Hegseth praying alongside him. He would like to remove women’s right to vote, and has said: “Men are created to exercise dominion over the earth; they are fitted to be husbandman.” And:

the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.

These extreme ideas are becoming more common among leading figures within the US right.

“Far from being a fringe belief system, masculinism has become the single most important force uniting the American right, bringing together an unlikely constellation of pastors, posters, senators, preachers, influencers, podcasters, and fanboys,” argued feminist journalist Helen Lewis in a popular Atlantic article.

While right-wing leaders may disagree on Israel, or the role of big tech, they are united in their belief that feminism has destroyed the world, she says.

Though these ideas are also evident in Australia, they are so far confined to the fringes. Far-right commentary website XYZ, for example, whose editor-in-chief David Hiscox once said his goal was “redpilling white men about race” to advocate for the establishment of a “white” ethno-state, includes articles titled “Women’s and girl’s sports need to be banned”, “The woman problem” and “The decay of man”, all promoting masculinist sentiments.

At the same time, a recent study showed 25–30% of Australian boys aged 13–17 agreed with misogynistic attitudes, with 28% supporting “violence to resist feminism”. This mirrors a growing global sentiment that “feminism has gone too far” or that men are now discriminated against.

Extreme men’s rights

A core tenet of feminism has been to argue against simplistic gender roles, stating women can be leaders and men can be carers. Modern masculinist movements are a backlash against these arguments. They argue feminism has undermined the inherent differences between men and women, creating an imbalance that has destroyed modern society.

Masculinists focus in particular on the role of women in the public sphere, arguing women are too irrational and emotional to be involved in politics.

Initial versions argued feminism had gone “too far” and that men’s issues were being ignored. While men’s rights movements had an underlying current of belief in male dominance, they often – at least officially – claimed they were only about achieving equality.

Today’s masculinist movements officially remove the mask. They argue not just that men’s issues have been ignored, but that we need to return to a world of full male dominance.

They argue we should strip women’s right to vote, that women should return to a “traditional” life as homemakers, and that husbands should be able to control their wives’ lives – including their weight, spending habits, television viewing, and when they have sex.

These ideas stem from a belief in fundamental differences between men and women. Dominant values in the West (and some other parts of the world) promote traits characterised as “masculine” (logic, reason, conflict, individualism) and disparage traits considered to be “feminine” (emotion, collectivity, cooperation, being other-oriented).

Valuing one set of traits over another promotes the idea that men are more suited to being leaders in politics and business, while women are more suited to life in the home. Much of this is driven by the needs of capitalism, which has privatised domestic care.

As families have increasingly become less able to survive on one salary alone, this model has become untenable for many, with women increasingly entering the workforce over the past 50 years. Even so, these gendered roles have largely stayed the same.

Masculinists trace what they perceive as a collapse in good governance to women’s involvement. They argue not only that women shouldn’t be political leaders, but that they shouldn’t have the right to vote. Some, such as Wilson, advocate returning to a “family vote”, where male heads of households get to decide on the vote for the entire house.

Masculinists want men to have control in the family too. They promote the return to men being the heads of households and women being subservient homemakers and child-rearers. This aligns with white supremacist views.

Some masculinists believe that in pursuing careers, white women stopped having enough babies, resulting in a “replacement” of white people with people of colour.

Uniting the far right

Masculinism is an idea – and a movement – we need to take seriously. There are no serious moves to abolish suffrage, ban women from politics, or legally force them back into the home – yet. But these ideas are becoming increasingly mainstream in the US, as Wilson’s association with the upper echelons of the US government shows.

“Bit by bit we start to break down these walls … and then one day, we become the mainstream,” said Fuentes in a 2019 livestream, outlining his own strategy.

Despite the serious allegations he has faced, Andrew Tate and his ideas have received widespread political support, including allegations the Trump White House intervened in his case in Romania to have a travel ban lifted. (The White House denies backing the Tates in this way.) It is unclear what impact the Tate brothers’ weekend arrest will have on the support they receive.

Australia has yet to go as far as the US, with no mainstream leaders espousing views as extreme as the Tates or Wilson in the US. However, One Nation has increasingly adopted men’s rights and anti-feminist views, evidenced by Pauline Hanson’s recent attack on paid parental leave. Anti-feminist sentiment is also growing in the country, and Andrew Tate himself has become a very popular (albeit contested) figure here.

Feminists and anti far-right groups continue to resist this ideology – through the #metoo movement, for example, and in ongoing fights for abortion rights, increased pay for women, rights for trans people, and so much more.

However, the role of misogyny and masculinist thinking is still often ignored by those studying and fighting against far-right organisations – particularly security agencies, but also many mainstream researchers. Misogyny is often seen as a “lesser” extremism, ignoring the real violence this ideology creates.

Masculinism as a movement, however, is gaining steam. We must tackle it, both to stop the epidemic of violence against women and to ensure we don’t lose the gains feminism has made. The Conversation

Simon Copland, Honorary Fellow in Sociology, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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AN 3 26

Since assuming the self-titled role of “Secretary of War,” machismo has been at the core of Pete Hegseth’s military leadership. According to a new op-ed by the i Paper columnist Ian Dunt, Hegseth’s “fragile masculinity” is not only an “insecure” projection, but an “embarrassment” to the United States that makes the country “weaker.”

Machismo has always been at the core of the Trump administration’s ethos, Dunt explained, as it has sought to promote executive authority while denigrating women and LGBTQ people, and no one in the administration better represents that than “moron” Pete Hegseth. Not only is he unqualified and “perhaps the least complex individual ever given high office,” but he has “translated his personal flaws into the operating manual for the US armed forces.”

Dunt argued that this issue dates back to the earliest days of Hegseth’s tenure, which he launched with complaints about pronouns, “climate change obsession,” and “dudes in dresses.” Then in what Dunt called “one of the weirdest single moments in American military history,” Hegseth gathered the majority of the nation’s generals and other defense leaders to chastise them about facial hair and various culture war talking points as “they sat in baffled silence.”

As Dunt pointed out, while most recognize his “fragile” overcompensation, “Only in Trump-land would he be considered a sensible candidate for anything.” But the problem with having someone like Hegseth in power isn’t just a matter of morality, but a question of effectiveness.

“This personality type does not plan,” wrote Dunt. “In fact, planning is considered distinctly effeminate. Evidence-seeking, briefings, assessments of vulnerabilities, scrutinising your expectations, critically assessing your strategic objectives, using deep domain knowledge to establish geopolitical reality, understanding the motivation of your opponent: these are the qualities which win conflicts.”

But as the Trump administration is now discovering as the war in Iran expands, Hegseth's approach does not deliver the rapid results that they hoped for. Dunt cites reports that the Iranian regime has turned down two US requests seeking a ceasefire while closing the Strait of Hormuz, throwing the global energy market into chaos.

The impact of all this, Dunt argued, is being felt economically, politically, and beyond, not only weakening the United States but emboldening its greatest foes like Russia and China. What’s more, “It is an embarrassment for a great nation like the US.”

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AN 1 26

Following the recent shooting of Renee Good by an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States, the Donald Trump administration’s latest narrative suggests that “deluded wine moms” are to blame for the violence in ICE-related demonstrations in Minneapolis and across the country.

This mother-blaming is nothing more than an old trick with a new spin.

Organized gangs of ‘wine moms’

A Fox News columnist recently wrote that “organized gangs of wine moms” are using “antifa tactics” to “harass and impede” ICE activity. In the opinion piece, he claimed that “confusion” over the what constitutes civil disobedience is what “got 37-year-old Renee Good killed.”

Similarly, Vice-President J.D. Vance called Good a “deranged leftist” while a new acronym, AWFUL — Affluent White Female Urban Liberal — has appeared on social media.

In framing protesters like Good, a mother of three, as confused, aggressive and “delusional,” this narrative delegitimizes and pathologizes maternal activism.

This strategy aims to divert blame from the U.S. government and its heavy-handed approach to immigration — which has resulted in yet another slaying of a protester by ICE agents in Minneapolis, this time a male nurse who was reportedly coming to the aid of a female demonstrator — while also drawing on a centuries-old strategy of blaming mothers for social problems.

What makes a ‘wine mom?’

The term “wine mom” emerged over the last two decades as a cultural symbol of the contemporary white, suburban mother who turns to a nightly glass of wine (or two) to cope with the stresses of daily life.

The archetype goes back much further, reflected in literature, film and television characters, such as the wily Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development.

Yet, this motif is less light-hearted than assumed: a recent systematic review reveals a strong link between maternal drinking and stress, especially for working mothers.

While it would be easy to view problematic drinking as another example of maternal failure, it is important not to. Here’s why.

Mother-blame in history

Throughout history, mothers have found themselves in the midst of what American sociologist Linda Blum calls a “mother-valor/mother-blame binary.”

When behaving in accordance with socially acceptable and desirable parameters — that is with warmth, femininity and selflessness — mothers are viewed as “good.” When mothers violate these norms, whether by choice, circumstance or by virtue of their race or class position, they’re “bad mothers.”

Mother-blame ultimately reflects the belief that mothers are solely responsible for their children’s behaviour and outcomes, along with the cultural tendency to blame them when things go wrong. Yet, as Blum points out, “mother-blame also serves as a metaphor for a range of political fears.”

Perhaps the most striking example of this is the suffrage movement, which represented a direct challenge to patriarchal notions that women belonged in the domestic sphere and lacked the intelligence to engage in political discourse.

Suffragettes in the United Kingdom — many of them mothers — occasionally used extreme tactics, such as window-smashing and arson, while women in the U.S. obstructed traffic and waged hunger strikes.

These activists were framed as threatening to not only the establishment, but also to families and the moral fabric of society.

Ironically, despite the fact that women’s entry into politics led to increased spending and improved outcomes related to women, children, families and health care, scholars have found that mother-blaming was as common after the women’s movement as it was before.

Contemporary mother-blame

Beyond political matters, contemporary mother-blame is rampant in other domains.

Mothers have been blamed for a wide variety of their children’s psychological problems, including anxiety, depression and inherited trauma. In media and literature, mothers are often blamed for criminality and violence, reflecting the notion that “mothers make monsters.”

When children struggle in school, educators and administrators may blame the mother. Mothers risk being called “too passive” if they don’t advocate for their children or “too aggressive” when they do.

Similarly, the “crazy woman” or “hysterical mother” is a well-known trope in custody law, and mothers may be blamed even when their children are abused by others. Mass shootings? Mom’s failure. The list goes on.

By setting up mothering as a high-stakes endeavour, the cultural norm of mother-blame also serves to “divide and conquer.”

In my sociology research, I found that mothers on Facebook worked to align themselves with like-minded “superior” mothers, while distancing themselves from perceived “inferior” mothers. This feeds into the cultural norm of “combative mothering,” which pits mothers against each other.

An old trick with a new spin

The “wine mom” narrative builds on this historical pattern of mother-blame. It is meant to trivialize, delegitimize, divide and denigrate mothers who are, in fact, well-organized and motivated activists concerned for their communities.

While there are legitimate concerns around maternal drinking as a coping mechanism, the “wine mom” label has begun to represent something different. Mothers are reclaiming the title to expand their cause.

As @sara_wiles, promoting the activist group @redwineblueusa stated on Instagram: “They meant to scare us back into the kitchen, but our actual response is, ‘Oh, I want to join!’”

We should acknowledge that rather than causing societal problems, mothers have a long history of trying to fix them, even if imperfectly. Mothers like Renee Good are no exception.

Darryn DiFrancesco, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Human and Health Sciences, *University of Northern British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 12 25

Over the years, right-wing firebrand author Ann Coulter argued, on various occasions, that the United States needs to "reconsider women's suffrage." And during Trump's second presidency, however, an increasing number of Christian nationalists and MAGA influencers are flat-out calling for the repeal of the 19th Amendment, which, in 1920, gave women nationwide the right to vote.

Dale Patridge, a far-right evangelical Christian nationalist pastor, said, "I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I love America." Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate called for the U.S. to "stop letting women vote," and anti-feminist Hanna Pearl Davis repeatedly calls for women to lose their voting rights. Another opponent of women's suffrage is Idaho-based pastor Doug Wilson, an ally of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

In a column published on December 4, The Guardian's Moira Donegan warns that the movement to repeal the 19th Amendment is quite real among Christian nationalists and MAGA Republicans.

"More and more," the progressive observes, "influential voices in the MAGA movement and the far-right Republican Party are calling to strip women of the franchise. It's not that this is strictly a new development. Opposition to women's voting rights has long been a fringe, but persistent, feature of the American right. It's been a favorite hobby horse of extremist preachers; it trended among Trump supporters on social media in the lead-up to the 2016 election, when polls showed that Trump would win if only men voted."

Since 1920, Donegan notes, "opposition to women's right to vote" has "simmered at the extreme edges of political opinion." But increasingly, she emphasizes, MAGA figures are saying the quiet part out loud in 2025.

"Joel Webbon, a pastor and YouTube personality, has been at the forefront of this brand of misogynist Christian reaction….. The opponents of women's suffrage have, for now, no way of enacting their ambition: there is no path to repealing the 19th Amendment," Donegan warns. "But they are part of a growing movement to blame women's advancement — and their increased access, participation and visibility in education, the workforce, politics and public life — for a slew of social problems, from political polarization to economic stagnation to a vague sense of spiritual anomie…. This range of sexisms that have attained mainstream credibility in politics and the press rest on one assumption: that women's citizenship is partial and conditional compared with men's, that we have less of a claim on rights, dignity and public participation than our brothers do."

Donegan adds, "That this assumption is even held is an insult to women's dignity; that it is now so blithely accepted is a sign of how far women’s status has already sunk."

*Moira Donegan's full column for The Guardian is available at this link.

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AN 11 25

Churches are seeing a mass exodus of formerly evangelical Christian women who are "disengaging from religion" due to conflicting viewpoints and politics,according to a reportin the Religion News Service (RNS).

These women, known as "exvangelicals," have found themselves turned off by their churches' and families' embrace of President Donald Trump and his far-right viewpoints.

"What upsets me most is how politics has become so intertwined with the church,” said Taylor Yoder. “It turned a lot of evangelicalsin my life really ugly.”

Yoder said her family's support of Trump caused her to "deconstruct" her faith. She also said that friendships with LGBTQ co-workers caused her to "reexamine what she’d been told about homosexuality."

“Do I really believe that these people deserve to burn in hell just because they don’t believe like me?” she asked.

IFrame Content

Yoder, now an atheist, critiques evangelicalism and its political ties in videos on TikTok, where she has amassed an impressive following.

This trend of "exvangelicals," RNS writes, is catching on with many young women like Yoder, who are generating "a flurry of memoirs, podcasts, social media posts and YouTube channels depicting evangelical culture as oppressive, unhealthy and even harmful."

"Their critiques converge on four themes: politics, patriarchy, abuse and the treatment of LGBTQ people. They tell of churches rallying behind Trump, keeping women out of leadership and instead promoting a culture of 'purity,' while failing to address abuse scandals exposed in the #ChurchToo movement that followed #MeToo," they explain.

Some call this divine intervention.

“I think God is raising up women to speak out,” said Amy Hawk, author of “The Judas Effect: How Evangelicals Betrayed Jesus for Power.” “God is allowing this so that we can see the corruption and step away from it.”

Hawk also has an impressive following on social media where she argues, "Bible in hand, that it is unbiblical to support Trump," RNS writes.

This has made her a beacon for women who have left the church. “Many are coming to me and saying, ‘Thank you, I thought I was going out of my mind,'" she said.

April Ajoy, author of “Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding a True Faith,” woke up when she saw a former church acquaintance on TV storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 "under Christian nationalist flags." Then her brother came out as gay.

“I spent nights crying because I felt so alone and confused, questioning if everything I ever believed was a lie,” she said, and only later recalled things she’d said to others. “I didn’t realize my own hypocrisy in the middle of it,” said Ajoy. “I feel like the evangelical God is in a very tiny box.”

Yoder said her decision to leave the church was confirmed after seeing late MAGA podcaster Charlie Kirk elevated to martyr status.

"He embodies how hateful and divisive they can be toward LGBTQ people. He was very much the opposite of what I wanted to be a part of," she said.

According to the Pew Research Center, research from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that exvangelicals are comprised of 58 percent female and 42 percent male.

Their reasons vary, RNS writes: "80 percent say they no longer believe their religion’s teachings, 58 percent cite anti-LGBTQ views, while half say their faith harmed their mental health."

Beth Allison Barr, a Baylor University historian who chronicles women’s roles in the early and medieval church, says that women make up more of the exvangelical movement for one reason in particular.

"Women don’t see a place for themselves in the church,” Barr said. “They don’t hear women-elevated stories. They do not feel like their callings are appreciated.”

For many women, "Trump’s rise — and evangelical support for him — was a turning point," RNS explains. About 80 percent of white evangelical Protestants voted for him in the past three presidential elections.

“I honestly could not believe that the church was holding him up as anybody besides a con man and an abuser,” Hawk said. “I spent all those years ministering to women, being the hands and feet of Jesus, and then the church is telling me I should be excited about somebody that attacks women.”

Christian author Sheila Wray Gregoire likens the stories of exvangelical women to the early stages of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s.

It’s a “rejection of Christianity as being about power,” Gregoire said. “I think that’s where we are, where people are dissatisfied with the church as it is. What’s coming hasn’t come yet. And we can’t see what that’s going to look like. But it’s an exciting place to be.”

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MMA

Charlie Kirk complains of “young women that are infected with the Jezebel spirit that had no interest in getting married or having children, that wanted to be the boss of the relationship”

07/16/25

NOTE KARO SPOX SORTA ACKNOWLEDGES SYSTEMIC MISOGYNY EXISTS, BUT DOES NOT MATTER BC YOU CAN JUST WILL YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS

musk bolso chainsawCPAC

no lnx an

'You have been gaslit': CPAC oozes MAGA's 'male inequality' agenda

People react as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) annual meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, U.S., February 22, 2025.

Matt Laslo February 23, 2025

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — This just might be the year American men finally overcome centuries of political, cultural and marital oppression that have ravaged the gender and kept guys locked out of key policies, like the Violence Against Women Act.

That’s what one conservative vendor peddled at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. And they’re not alone. The oft-repeated message being subtly driven into CPAC attendees – is that the era of male victimhood is over.

Culture wars are now king.

In years past, the conservative confab focused on fiscal responsibility and cutting federal spending. This year — even as Republicans in Congress and the White House debate trillions of dollars in budget cuts — leaders stoked gendered culture wars.

“Don't allow this broken culture to send you a message that you're a bad person because you're a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you're competitive," Vice President J.D. Vance told CPAC attendees Thursday.

Eradicating diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives may have merely been a stepping stone. Conservatives have rallied behind a new, if antiquated, gospel of manhood as they work to turn back time and eviscerate what they call "wokeness" in real time.

At CPAC, this is truly a man’s world, or will be soon if the resurgent right succeeds.

“Male Inequality”

Masculinity is everywhere here at CPAC. It’s tangible, making this year’s conference feel more like an all-male retreat than the policy-focused escape the annual event was before President Donald Trump remade American conservatism in his image.

In these conservative confines, there’s no gender pay gap (even as statistics show women earn roughly 75 cents for each dollar a man makes). Women’s suffrage, practically speaking, is a fairy tale of a bygone era. While Bibles abound, the Book of Ruth and its strong, central female cast, is an afterthought (if a thought at all).

The real problem is “Male Inequality,” according to the newly launched Men’s Equality Network, or MEN.

‘Areas of Male Inequality’ — a pamphlet MEN are handing out at this year’s CPAC.

At CPAC, MEN seeks to drum up support for the hashtag #genderequalityformen, while also giving away free caps emblazoned with “Watchdog: Stop the gender agenda.”

MEN's tagline succinctly sums up the mission that drives the group: “assuring due process, fairness and equal opportunities for men.” And while they may only be a few weeks old, MEN has already attracted 18 partners, ranging from United Families International to the Child Custody Coalition.

The group is so new, it hasn't held its first meeting. But MEN soon plans to start hosting monthly training sessions with partner organizations, then storm the marble halls of Washington, demanding equality for men.

And MEN has allies in powerful places in Trump’s Washington.

"Our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge, you should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place," Vance opined from the CPAC main stage. He, like MEN, provided no evidence to support his contention.

While the group is surely easy to single out, it's far from alone in its drive to restore manhood to its properly patriarchal perch at CPAC but also throughout society.

"Go fu#% yourself Planned Parenthood”

Entering this year’s hall of vendors at CPAC, it’s seemingly impossible to miss the loud magenta “Go fu#% yourself Planned Parenthood” banner next to a cardboard cutout of President Trump.

Defund Planned Parenthood photo (Photo credit: Matt Laslo)

A few rows away, at first blush, the booth for "Date on the Right" seems dedicated to online romance for Republicans. But the material seems more focused on connecting hardline conservatives with their policy dreams.

Instead of promising long-term love, the group’s selling point feels more politically inclined than lifemate: “Dating for conservatives: only two genders – male and female allowed. No pronouns but male or female allowed.”

Other booths are dotted with free swag seeking to uproot political correctness — “I support free speech, not political correctness,” reads one sticker — through slogans like, “God, Guns and Girly Things” or “Woman: an adult human female.”

“We have an entire generation of young men who are smoking weed, watching porn, not getting married — not even pursuing women,” American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told CPAC attendees. “We have this thing called incels — involuntary celibates. It's terrible. And we can't become a great nation again — we can't make America great again — until our men are great again.” //TUCKER MAINSTREAM GRT?

“You’ve been gaslit to high heaven”

For attendees, conservatives are undeniably victims. The thousands gathered at CPAC are set on righting those past perceived wrongs.

“You’ve been gaslit to high heaven every time you picked up a newspaper in the United States,” conservative anchor Megyn Kelly told the crowd. “Every time you’ve turned on CNN. You’ve been lied to. You’ve been bullied — or seen others with lesser power — bullied by the media and the leftist Democrats. You have been a victim of overbearing and controlling leftists who think they are the final arbiters of what’s best for you and your life.”

While this may be MEN's year, conservative women aren’t going quietly.

CPAC may be a man’s world these days, despite all the powerful women in today’s GOP, like White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who, at 27, is the youngest person to ever hold the prestigious role.

On the CPAC stage this week, former White House communications director Mercedes Schlapp — wife of CPAC chair Matt Schlapp who a sheriff wrote up earlier this month for allegedly groping a man — asked Leavitt about being a woman in Trump world.

"Look at the White House and look at the exceptional Cabinet President Trump has put together," Leavitt said. "While we don’t care about identity politics…the president has appointed Susie Wiles, our first female chief of staff in United States history; Brooke Rollins heading up as our secretary of agriculture — look across the entire Cabinet. There are incredible women — Linda McMahon, leading the Department of Education — the list goes on and on."

As for her advice to young women, Leavitt departed from her party’s new man-centric mantra.

"Stay strong, speak the truth and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t achieve your dream, or you can’t get to that next step. Just believe in yourself, because there will be a lot of people who don’t believe in you, who cast doubt on you, who talk bad about you," Leavitt said. "Screw ‘em. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter." DEFIANCE FIGHT FIGHTFIGHT PWR OF POS THINKING

NOW READ: Whoever tries to tell you that Trump is Christian needs to look up this passage in the Bible

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1st to jump ship in order to look smart? influential

an 12 24

as Donald Trump's defense secretary pick, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, faces sexual assault allegations, longtime right-wing commentator Ann Coulter is blasting the MAGA pick on allegations of adultery, Mediaite reports.

"In all of this talk about whether Pete Hegseth is an abuser of women, no one even mentioned that he is a serial adulterer! Are we a society that doesn’t care about adultery anymore?"

Per NJ.com, "Documents surfaced after his nomination that accused Hegseth of sexual assault in 2017. A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public late."

But that's not Coulter's main concern.

"Adultery hasn’t even been mentioned," she said on a recent episode of Unsafe with Ann Coulter podcast.

According to Mediate, the conservative host continued:

*And Pete Hegseth is well known to have now been married on his third marriage. Gets married, gets his wife pregnant, little kids at home or kid at home — I don’t know the details. Starts having sex with his producer, dumps his first wife, married his producer, gets her pregnant. Again, she’s either pregnant or she’s home with kid or kids, and then commits adultery on her. Dumps the second wife, and now, I guess is, let’s hope happily married to his third wife. The fact that it was three times, and this sleazy, and everyone at Fox News knew about it is one thing. But seriously, does no one-, no one is even mentioning the adultery! I’m sorry, this is liberals winning. This is liberals changing our culture in this subtle and insidious way where the only rules that matter are the feminist rules, not the rules that have protected women for millennia, like don’t cheat on your wife.

Scientific proof Republicans are killing women - Alternet.org

1/6 analysis

12 21 raw an relationship coach kind // life coach?

...Both men overtly invoke the apocalypse, and self-consciously make QAnon references in their respective podcasts.

“What is going on here in America?” Cusick said in the Oct. 19 episode of his podcast. “They have us — we’re enslaved…. When the pilgrims came to America in 1620 — four hundred years from then goes to 2020 — when did this awakening start in the United States? Everyone started realizing what was going on with our elections, with Hollywood, with all these elites. It started in 2020, thanks to our president, Donald Trump.”

Cusick offered an allegory, comparing Americans from the settling of the colonies in the 1600s to the Israelites who, according to the Old Testament, were enslaved in Egypt under the pharaoh. By way of explaining how the United States, which after all, was supposedly “founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” had been “enslaved” since before its founding, Cusick claimed that “it was infiltrated and it became Satanic.”

For Cusick, Trump is to be credited for awakening a sense of nationalism in Americans and helping them define an enemy, which happens to be their fellow citizens.

“Trump’s the one who made people all of a sudden realize we have a country, and we have an opposition, whether you were on the left side or the right side,” Cusick said.

While concerned with something entirely different — helping men have more sex, as opposed to saving souls for Jesus — Stedman offered a similar chronology in his Dec. 9 blog post entitled “Why Your Woman Stops Wanting Sex.”

“We have been experiencing a gradual dark night of soul these past 100 years; as I write this in December 2021 we are near the culmination of it,” he wrote. Then, he went straight to the apocalypse: “In this collapse all that has been hidden is becoming seen. We are living through the apocalypse— the great revealing. The great awakening.”

After invoking apocalypse as a force for a transformation in gender relations, Stedman advised young men that they should strive for “consensual polarity” while making it clear that he was not advocating for equality: In his view, the men are protagonists; women are material to be “forged.”

“Such a relationship is well within your grasp,” Stedman advised. “In spite of all the programming, suitable women are all around; though many do need guidance — you will need to help forge them. But the limiting factor is you. Because you can only take a woman as far as you yourself have gone.”...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/proud-boys/

Right-wing extremists have long fled behind humor and irony to escape consequences for their hateful ideology, and that allowed some of them to hide in plain sight before Donald Trump's supporters tried to violently overturn his election loss.

They've never made any secret of their efforts to use humor and irony as both a weapon and defense, and those tools also allow them to sell what might otherwise be considered toxic to potential converts, reported NPR.

"Irony is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views," said 22-year-old extremist Nick Fuentes in a video from last year.

Fuentes specifically mentioned Holocaust denial -- or "revision," as he puts it -- as a topic he smuggles into conversations under the cover of irony, and he recently went on an extended violent and misogynistic rant about domestic abuse that he punctuated with a smirk toward the camera.

"Just kidding!" he told viewers, after urging a viewer to violently "punish" his wife. "No, I'm kidding, of course. Just kidding. Just a joke."

Weaponized irony allows extremists like Christian Secor, a Fuentes fan who was charged in the Capitol riot, to skirt past consequences after his UCLA classmates grew increasingly worried about his glorification of guns, racist and anti-Semitic social media posts and other bigoted behavior, which he insisted was just "trolling" whenever he was called to account.

"It's called a joke and the fact that you think that these posts are anything more than that is telling," Secor told one classmate who flagged an offensive tweet.

Fuentes and other right-wing content creators urge their followers to hide behind irony and then try to shame their critics into silence.

"A lot of these content creators will tell the audience explicitly, 'When people say you're racist for liking this or thinking this, just laugh at them. They can't handle it — they're sensitive babies,' " said Jared Holt, a resident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.

UCLA took no action against Secor despite his escalating behavior, likely out of free speech concerns at the public institution, and classmates said they were afraid to report him for the same reason.

"I definitely felt that sense of threat," said student Oona Flood, "and, like, I really hate to say, [because] it sounds so much like, overblown, 'snowflake,' that we're just overreacting, you know?"

The Ku Klux Klan were portrayed as outlandish, rather than dangerous, in its early days, and French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously noted the way Nazis attempted to hide behind absurdist humor to cover their hate -- and give themselves an unfair advantage.

"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies," Sartre wrote in 1944. "They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."

The Proud Boys, the pro-Trump paramilitary group named after a song from Disney's "Aladdin," revel in irony, indulging in ridiculous bonding rituals before engaging in street fights, and at least 25 members of the right-wing group are facing conspiracy and other charges related to the Capitol insurrection.

True to form, group founder Gavin McInnes mocked the media in an email to NPR, which he said "willfully ignores" the group's in-jokes to make them look bad.

The Proud Boys are "funny dudes, not Nazis," McInnes wrote.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

The legislation requires companies to add women to their boards or pay a fine

One-quarter of the publicly traded companies headquartered in California don’t have any women on their boards, according to the bill’s authors, California state Sen. Hannah Beth Jackson and Senate President Toni Atkins, who are both Democrats.

Nationally, women on boards are dramatically underrepresented: According to Catalyst, women make up about 20 percent of S&P 500 board seats. There are 12 Fortune 500 companies with no women on their boards whatsoever, and the number of Fortune 500 CEOs dropped by 25 percent this year, from 32 to 24.

Evidence suggests that having more gender and racial diversity in the boardroom is good for business. A Peterson Institutestudy found that the presence of women on corporate boards and in the C-suite may contribute to firm performance, and that among profitable companies, a move from no women leaders to 30 percent representation was associated with a 15 percent jump in profit.

Credit Suisse estimates that companies with more gender diversity in the boardroom see better stock market returns and valuations, and McKinsey found that the most gender-diverse companies are 15 percent more likely to outperform their peers.

Amanda Packel, co-director of the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford, cautioned that these findings can be overstated — a correlation between diversity and business performance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean causation.

“Companies that are more prominent and have better performance might be under more scrutiny, or are more focused on the issue, or are able to attract more women or diverse directors,” she said. “That being said, there is certainly a business case in terms of the need for diversity on the board, whether you can prove it in a regression analysis or not.”

But evidence alone hasn’t been enough to get companies in California to act. In 2013, Jackson sponsored a nonbinding resolution urging each public company to increase the number of women on its boards by 2017. But by December 31, 2016,less than 20 percent of them had followed the recommendation.

Europe has required women on corporate boards

Some European countries, including Germany, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, and France, have quotas and fines requiring to add women to their boards. Norway in 2008 required companies listed there to give at least 40 percent of their director seats to women.

Aaron Dhir, an associate professor at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School and the author of a book about boardroom diversity, has studied the issue extensively.

“Like the California quota, the Norwegian quota was hugely controversial, but the directors who I interviewed, most of whom were initially against it, it was only after they saw the law in action and actually experienced it that they actually changed their minds and warmed to the quota,” he said.

Norwegian companies came to understand that sometimes such a blunt instrument is necessary, given implicit biases, and diversity improved the overall quality of governance and decision-making.

Women and people of color have different life experiences and perspectives than white men who typically comprise boards, and that makes a difference. Quotas force companies to look outside of the normal places for diverse candidates who might not have the typical background for such a position.

“Companies expanded their one-dimensional picture of what a qualified board member should be,” Dhir said.

The bill is controversial — and it might not hold up in court

Because so many companies are headquartered in California — 377 of the largest 3,000 publicly held companies in the US are located there — the bill could make a difference if companies comply. But it could also face legal challenges.

More than 30 business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, oppose the law, according to the LA Times. The businesses argue that the law will “displace an existing member of the board of directors solely on the basis of gender” and that it focuses too narrowly only on gender instead of other aspects of diversity, including race and sexual orientation.

Successful equal protection challenges under the US and California constitutions could nullify the law: The government would have to prove not only that there is disparity in board representation among men and women but also that such a divide is a sufficient reason to create a special law for women.

“It makes a categorization based on gender, which is subject to increased scrutiny if the law is challenged, and it’s not 100 percent clear how that would play out,” Packel, from Stanford, said. “The state would have to meet a burden in terms of showing the reason that legislation is needed and why this methodology is necessary.”

There are also questions about whether it will apply to companies that are headquartered in California but incorporated elsewhere. (Most US companies are incorporated in Delaware for tax reasons.)

The “internal affairs doctrine” ensures the state in which a company is incorporated governs issues such as voting rights, dividends, and investor relations,Joseph Grundfest, a Stanford University law professor and former commissioner for the Securities and Exchange Commission, argued a recent paper outlining the legal case against the bill. That would limit the law’s application to just 72 corporations headquartered and chartered in California.

Most of those companies already comply with the bill’s mandates. But one doesn’t: Apple, which has two women on its eight-member board. Apple is one of the most recognized brands in the world and became the first $1 trillion publicly traded company in the US. Adding more diversity to its board would not be insignificant.

Still, if the law does stand, there is also a chance that companies will just pay the fine and move on — a few hundred thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket for a lot of companies, particularly Apple.

“I do think for big companies, it could be like any other fine, where it’s just the cost of doing business,” Levinson said. “But for smaller companies, this is a big hit.”

If we wait for the market to just figure this out, we’ll be waiting a while

Waiting for boardrooms to eventually become diverse will take a long time: the Government Accountability Office in 2016 estimated that women in S&P 1500 companies will reach parity with men in 40 years.

Grundfest argues that shareholder activism, not a state requirement, is the way to get more women on boards. Essentially, that means big funds insisting the companies they invest in having diverse boards, engaging with companies to increase diversity, and potentially withholding votes.

Levinson, from Loyola, said the California law is “government overreach” and what matters more is corporate culture. “It feels like kind of a sledge hammer when you actually need a thousand tiny little stitches,” she said.

There are some institutions that have taken more of an interest in diversity as of late, including pension funds CalPERS and CalSTRS and investment giants State Street and BlackRock. And the #MeToo movement has also brought attention to the issue of women in corporate America.

“The bottom line is, we need to make [board diversity] a reality, and the only way you make it a reality is if the marketplace demands it,” David Katz, a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City, said.

Still, waiting for the markets to come around and corporate culture to change isn’t exactly a satisfying answer for women who want more equal representation now, not when they’re old or dead. The fact that women need to make an evidence-based case for their inclusion on boards, in some ways, proves the point.

Nobody asks the opposite question, said Fong, the Catalyst vice president: “Where is the business case for keeping a board all white and all male?”

wow, anti-fem at the start w ERA schalfly, TP constant tight up to gamergate/ red pill?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trump/

no lnx

How southern white women drove the GOP to Donald Trump

written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon July 1, 2019

“The Long Southern Strategy,” a new book by political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, first caught my eye because there’s a long history of denialism surrounding the “Southern strategy.” People sometimes claim that it’s a liberal myth or that it’s ancient history, or that wasn’t the real reason for the Southern realignment in American politics. That denialism has only intensified and grown more significant since the election of Donald Trump.

But Maxwell and Shields’ book turns out to be more than just well-timed, as its subtitle suggests: “How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.” Rather than simply showing that the Southern strategy was a long-term phenomenon, the book shows that it was a continuously reshaped and evolving strategy, that it was multifaceted — involving gender and religion as crucially as race — and that in remaking the Republican Party and the South, it remade American politics as well. “The Long Southern Strategy” explains this reshaping process remaking better than anything else I’ve read, and does so via a compelling multi-disciplinary combination of history, cultural criticism and social science.

In “The Reactionary Mind” (Salon review here), political theorist Corey Robin argued that conservative politics “speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.” Conservatives may have balked at Robin’s argument, but “The Long Southern Strategy” convincingly describes the specific combination of such losses on which Republicans have played, and the specific form of conservatism that resulted.

The building blocks aren’t old-fashioned racism, sexism and religious fundamentalism — all have been reshaped into new forms, making new arguments for halting progress and turning back the clock, which is also a part of the book’s story. For example, as co-author Angie Maxwell told me, “Modern sexism describes feelings of resentment and distrust towards feminists and working women. Rather than believing that a woman cannot do a particular job, folks who express Modern sexism resents a woman for wanting to do that job.”

“The Long Southern Strategy” also explains why Donald Trump is not such an anomaly after all, but rather the culmination of where the GOP has been headed for the past 50-plus years. “I gave a series of lectures the year before the election, called ‘The Inevitability of Donald Trump,'” Maxwell told me — but even she thought Trump would make it no further than the Republican nomination. She was concerned, however, about how close the election was going to be, because she had applied “modern sexism measures” to national polling in 2012, and found alarmingly high numbers. “I was worried we were not accounting for that effect,” she said. Perhaps not.

So I thought Maxwell would be a perfect interview subject as the 2020 campaign begins in earnest. It’s an invaluable guide for making sense of what’s about to unfold, as well as how we got here. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

First I want to ask about the need to understand the Southern strategy as something long-term and continuing or evolving, not just a one-time event.

In short, with the Southern strategy, the story we tell is that after the Civil Rights Act, first Barry Goldwater and then Richard Nixon really played to white racial angst, and the South flipped to red. But when you start looking at not just the electoral map, but voting trends, the South goes pretty heavily back to Jimmy Carter in 1976. And most Southern politicians don’t change their party IDs during that period of time. You see from archival work and other scholarship how worried the GOP was post-Watergate that the inroads they made in the South they were going to lose. And sure enough, they do.

Now, if they were so adamant on a backlash to civil rights, then why pick Carter? But there this notion that Carter’s one of them — he shares their Southern identity, they understand him, he’s a born-again Christian. So the South kind of goes back [to the Democrats]. Then the Reagan folks in 1980 dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from their platform. This to me is the bridge. In 1980, the Republicans are trying again to win those Southern voters back, because they’ve really based their electoral map on that. They took that fork in the road in the late ’60s, and it’s kind of hard, once you set your strategy, to say, “Oh, let’s just pick a new one.” So they dropped the ERA.

This was a radical thing to do because the Equal Rights Amendment — and second-wave feminism in general — was a completely bipartisan effort. There were legions of Republican women feminists. In fact, they were some of the leaders in the movement. At the 1977 National Women’s Convention, the only national women’s convention we’ve ever had, every living first lady of both parties was there.. All the major congresswomen from both parties were there. What happened then was Phyllis Schlafly’s effort — she had written the book [A Choice, Not An Echo] that kind of inspired Goldwater to run years before — she started an anti-feminism counter rally, also in Houston, and had massive attendance at that, and their slogan was “family values.”

The GOP took notice. Schlafly was hoping it would get her a cabinet position, which it didn’t. But then the Reagan administration polls 40,000 women, an effort headed up by Richard Wirthlin, with Elizabeth Dole, and they classified American women into 64 types. They called them Nancys, Bettys — they give them names —and they realized that there were a whole lot more antifeminists out there than they realized, people who really wanted these traditional gender roles. I call them “antifeminist” because that is what they were calling themselves, a lot of times. Particularly in the South, among white women. And so that move [dropping the ERA] helped Reagan to secure a lot of those Southern white women. And that’s when you actually see people start changing their voter ID....

booktv 419

Katherine Marino, "Feminism for the Americas"UCLA professor Katherine Marino talked about the rise and impact of the…

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/8-must-reads-by-women-who-take-on-white-supremacy-and-patriarchal-power/

recent books

AN 119

We cannot blame women

To start, we need to make prevention at least as much a priority as early detection, better treatments and the search for cures. We also have to take a good look at all suspected causes.

Conversations about prevention often stir debate about what is to blame for thebreast cancer rates we are seeing. But an aging population of women who make bad lifestyle choices doesn’t explain increases in breast cancers in more and younger women.

It doesn’t explain why women who migrate from countries with lower rates of breast cancer develop the same rates within 10 years of living in their new homes. It also doesn’t explain the clusters of breast cancers in regions with high levels of air pollution containing definitive breast carcinogens.

We need confidence in what the science is already showing us about the role of environmental and workplace hazards in breast cancer causation.

Indeed, the evidence points to associations between numerous environmental pollutantsand an increased risk for breast cancer — including pesticides, herbicides, synthetic chemicals, endocrine disrupting chemicals and vehicle emissions. Living and working in proximity to these exposures, especially during vulnerable windows of development, is putting women at high risk.

Some occupations, including radiology, pharmacy, health care, hairdressing, working with plastics, manufacturing, agriculture, working as airline crew and firefighting, also carry a higher risk. These occupational sectors employ thousands of thousands of womenworldwide.

We need greater awareness and extended programmes that focus on these environmental and workplace causes. And we need to create and enforce policies and put regulations in place that prevent such exposures.

The climate change link

The women in Paul Villeneuve’s study are not unlike the female border guard. These cases are all linked to high levels of air pollution. Their stories are those of countless other women who face exposures to breast carcinogens in many Canadian urban environments and workplaces with high levels of traffic and industrial pollution.

We also have evidence that these exposures are increasing, as our climate is changing. This link is complex, as is so much about cancer generally. Air pollution is one of the many causes of climate change as well as breast cancer.

It is also believed that increased ambient air temperatures may change the effects of chemical contaminants on humans and that increased precipitation and flooding will move contaminants to places where greater exposure by humans is possible.

Finally, as the incidence of fires increase with climate change, exposures to chemicals associated with the development of breast cancer often found in fires also increase. Studies are now investigating possible elevated incidence of breast cancer among women firefighters. They are clearly a highly exposed group and may be just one example of women bearing an elevated breast cancer risk.

Prevention a priority

...

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/oxfam-state-department-women-lgbtq-rights-reporting

Thursday, Oxfam America released a damning report on the State Department's coverage of human rights abuses under President Donald Trump.

Historically, the State Department's human rights reports are an essential tool to monitor what is going on in authoritarian and theocratic nations around the globe. But according to the new report, two areas of human rights are receiving significantly less focus under the Trump administration: women's rights and LGBTQ rights.

Specifically, the report found that women's rights abuse reporting is down 31 percent under the Trump administration, while LGBTQ rights abuse reporting is down 21 percent.

"We also found that reporting on womens rights was reduced more in countries where gender inequality is higher — in other words, where the problem of violations of women’s rights is worse, the State Department cut back on reporting," said Oxfam America. "Reporting on women's rights was also reduced more in countries that send more asylum applicants. In other words, where desperate people try to flee, the State Department cut back on reporting." These results are not surprising. Trump is infamous for his abuse of women, and his administration has been making crackdowns of its own on LGBTQ rights, from transgender military service to the end of visas for LGBTQ partners of foreign diplomats. Moreover, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has extensive ties to the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates an antigay hate group.

But the news that women and LGBTQ persons are being overlooked in U.S. human rights reports is particularly dismaying in a time when they could be facing new threats around the globe. For example, Jair Bolsonaro, an anti-LGBTQ extremist who has reflected fondly on military dictatorship, just won the presidency in Brazil, the world's fifth-largest country.

It is clear that the Trump administration is uninterested in policing human rights in general, given that they withdrew the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council in June.

In the modern world, careful monitoring of threats to human rights is an essential pillar of international accountability. And if the United States is abandoning its role in doing so, it will be more important than ever for other nations, and NGOs, to step up and continue the fight.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?452058-1/after-words-rebecca-traister

New York Magazine's Rebecca Traistertraced the history of female anger and how it has fueled political movements. She was interviewed by Brittany Cooper, Rutgers University Women’s and Gender Studies professor and author of Eloquent Rage

https://www.alternet.org/heres-how-gender-became-partisan-issue

Speaking to reporters outside the White House on Tuesday, Donald Trump declared, "It's a very scary time for young men in America," in reference to the growing #MeToo movement and the increased pressure to hold men accountable for sexual harassment and violence. This comment echoed his son, Donald Trump Jr., who said earlier that he was more worried about his sonsthan his daughters in this political climate.

This is part of a rising narrative of men's supposed anger and fear over women's growing courage over the issue of sexual abuse, epitomized by Republican pollster Frank Luntz warning that men "believe that justice no longer exists in America, that the accusation is enough to destroy someone’s career and someone’s life." When questioned about these fears, men who express them — like Trump — resort to talking about "false" accusations. Since those continue to be few and far between, the likelier explanation is all this anger stems from a belief that women owe it to men to stay silent about abusive behavior, and that those women who behave are traitors.

But is this really a man vs. woman thing? A new study from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) complicates the picture quite a bit. In reality, skepticism about sexual harassment and a willingness to side with men who are accused — even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt — is shaped more by political party than by gender. That said, the researchers also found that the inverse is true, especially among young people: Gender is shaping attitudes around issues such as sexual harassment, and in turn is helping shape partisan identities.

Men of both parties were more willing than women to say they would vote for such a candidate, but the partisan gap was much more significant than the gender gap. For instance, there was a 13 point gap between Republican men and women on this issue, but a 42 point gap between Republican men and Democratic men.

What is also interesting about this finding is that a number of Republicans, at least, are being dishonest about this. Nine out of ten self-identified Republicans did vote for a man accused by multiple women of sexual harassment — Donald Trump — even though 34 percent now say they would never do that. But that election, as Cox points out, was "before the #MeToo movement". The shifting national discourse may make it less tenable for Republicans to say they would vote for a serial harasser, even if they privately continue to do so.

As Cox explained, the picture is more complicated than simply asserting that views on gender equality flow from partisan identity. Instead, he argued, for some voters gender issues increasingly impact how they vote and what party they identify with.

“There already have been more women in the Democratic Party than in the Republican Party, but we may see that gap widening," he said. "We’re looking at a historic gender gap in the 2018 election, and a lot of that was before [Brett] Kavanaugh."

PRRI research continues to show, in Cox's words, that there's a "growing youth gender gap, where we’re seeing young men and young women become increasingly polarized around a lot of these gender issues." In other words, and the number of young women who believe that sexism is widespread is growing while the number of young men who agree is shrinking. Young men are even more likely than older men to express fear of being falsely accused of sexual harassment.

Because of this, Cox said, young women in particular are flocking to the Democratic Party and reshaping it in their image,pushing the Democrats to the left on gender issues and pushing for more female candidates and more women in office. Unsurprisingly, PRRI data shows that Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to believe Roe v. Wade was a good decision, nearly three times as likely to say that contraception access is an important issue, and far more likely to rate both stopping sexual harassment and closing the gender wage gap as priority concerns.

These shifts have led to Democratic voters putting a much stronger emphasis on electing women to office than Republicans. Eighty percent of Democratic voters believe the country would be better off if more women were in elected offices, while only 31 percent of Republicans agree.

All this data resists a simplistic view of gender, party and politics. Party predicts attitudes about gender, but then again, people are sorting themselves into parties in large part based on their views regarding gender equality. While gender does not entirely predict levels of sexism, it's true that women are somewhat less sexist than men, and subsequently are more likely to identify as Democrats.

What is perhaps most interesting, however, is that gender issues have become more salient to voters overall. People are thinking about sexual harassment, workplace equality and reproductive rights more that ever -- and those issues are playing a bigger role in how they think about politics. The partisan battle over women's equality has grown more serious since the Trump vs. Clinton showdown of the 2016 election, but it may only be the beginning of an all-out political war.

brett k /hist

Are Republican women ever going to get fed up? It's the question that keeps cropping up after every incident of Republican political leaders minimizing, denying or excusing sexual harassment and abuse. So far, the answer is no. Republican women did not turn on Donald Trump after a tape was released featuring him bragging about sexual assault. Republican women did not turn on the party when it backed Roy Moore's campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, despite numerous reports of him creeping on teen girls as an adult man. Now the question is being raised again, in light of the allegations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court.

After Thursday's hearing — when it became clear that Kavanaugh's principal accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, was credible and backed by ample evidence while Kavanaugh himself appeared to lie multiple times under oath — the question arose all over again. Are Republican women finally going to wake up, realize that their party leadership sees them as second-class citizens, and fight back?

A survey of media reports suggests there's a lot of people who dearly hope so. "Here’s Why White Women Are Abandoning the GOP," blared a headline at the Atlantic.

"Republican Women Lose Faith in Kavanaugh — and Trump — After Week of Accusations," said a Morning Consult headline.

"New Poll: Kavanaugh, Trump Losing Support of Republican Women," declared New York magazine.

Other coverage, however, suggests a different story. Politico ran an article recently declaring that "party loyalty trumps #MeToo" for female Republicans. Local news covered rallies of women supporting Kavanaugh. The Associated Press ran a piece in which Republican women expressed skepticism about Ford's account and doubled down on their determination to support Republicans. Conservative pundits like Kellyanne Conway and Mollie Hemingway minimized the nature of the accusation, denying that what Ford described on worldwide live TV — being held down with her mouth covered, while an older teenage boy tried to remove her clothes — constituted assault and suggesting it was more like innocent flirting.

So what's the story here? Are Republican women getting fed up or not?

“Probably some of them are turning" on Kavanaugh, said Marjorie Spruill, a retired history professor and the author of "Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics." "But the vast majority of them, I doubt that they would, because they are committed to him on the basis of the policies that he would promote, just like they were with Trump."

Tresa Undem of the polling firm Perry Undem concurred, saying that the minority of Republican women who already disapprove of Trump will be more solidified in their distaste, but that "this is not going to have an effect" on the large majority of Republican women.

This week's polling data backs up that contention. A new CBS News poll shows that while only 29 percent of American women want Kavanaugh confirmed, a full 70 percent of Republican women want him on the bench. Even the Morning Consult poll that was being held out as evidence that Republican women were abandoning Trump and Kavanaugh didn't really show that. While there was some slippage of female Republican support, only about 15 percent of Republican women were willing to oppose Kavanaugh's confirmation — compared to 39 percent disapproval among all female voters.

Theses polls also found that Democratic and independent men were far more skeptical of Kavanaugh than Republican women -- and by wide margins.

While this might surprise casual observers, it did not surprise Undem, who told Salon, "Gender equality is very much a partisan issue," and noted that her own research has shown, over and over again, that Republican women are nearly as good at denying and minimizing sexism as Republican men. They tend to sign off on the same view that sexism isn't really a problem, but is largely something women make up to get attention or score political points.

For instance, Undem pointed out, the majority of women who voted for Trump, like the majority of men who did so, agreed with the statement, "Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist."

In a recent focus group, when Undem asked about the issue of the two parties' views on gender issues, she said she got "just blank stares" from Republican women.

This has been going on for decades, Spruill said, arguing that much of the political polarization of this moment reflects the way conservative women have aggressively organized in opposition to feminism. She pointed to the way anti-feminist women in the 1970s "redirected the Republican Party away from its traditional support for women’s rights" and shaped it into the boldly sexist party it is now.

While most of the focus of the gender fight of recent decades has been on issues like equal pay or abortion rights, Spruill observes that other questions directly relevant to the Kavanaugh case have long played a role. "Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum, for years, were opposed to a lot of what feminists said and did to try to protect women from violence, domestic abuse and sexual violence,” she said.

Schlafly's extensive history of bashing feminist efforts to prevent domestic violence and sexual abuse is still easy to find online. She railed against the Violence Against Women Act from its inception, claiming that it encouraged divorce and taught women to hate men. When Anita Hill stepped forward to accuse Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991, Schlafly argued that Hill was to blame for the harassment because she hadn't pushed back, and suggested that women in the workplace would have to learn "to thrive in a hostile environment."

The echoes of Schlafly's argument can still be heard in Laura Ingraham portraying Christine Blasey Ford as hysterical for being upset at an attempted rape or conservative legal commentator Sidney Powell describing stifling someone's screamsafter locking them in a room as "a fumbled attempt to make out with a girl at a party." Sexual abuse or assault by men and boys is treated, within this worldview, as something women must simply put up with. If women are upset or traumatized by it, that's held out as evidence that they are weak and undeserving of concern.

This kind of rhetoric is disturbing, but it is worth remembering that Republican women tend to live with Republican men. Choosing to be married to or live with men who make excuses for this sort of behavior means either getting on board — and perhaps even convincing yourself that it makes you "tough" to put up with it — or living with a degree of cognitive dissonance that is far more than most people can bear.

Undem emphasized that while most Republican women are sticking by their party and their men, however, a small percentage are getting wobbly — around 15 percent, the same proportion that now opposes Kavanaugh's confirmation. In plenty of congressional districts -- and nationally in the 2016 presidential race -- elections are won on the margins. Even a few percentage points of Republican women going sour and quitting the party in disgust could turn the electoral tide in 2018, and might make an even bigger difference when the pussy-grabber-in-chief is up for re-election in 2020.

:{Why We Need More :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{Women:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ Involved in Creating Environmental Policy:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

By Lucy Goodchild van Hilten

Three years into the Sustainable Development Goals—17 global goals set by the United Nations—many countries' policy makers are developing domestic legislation that will help them reach environmental targets, from cutting carbon emissions to improving clean water and sanitation. But when it comes to environmental research and action, weighing the options to reach policy decisions relies on personal experience and perspective as well as facts and evidence, and gender plays a major role.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rights-favorite-new-intellectual-has-some-truly-pitiable-ideas-about-masculinity

More than a decade ago, when he reviewed Harvard curmudgeon Harvey Mansfield’s book, *Manliness*, Walter Kirn asked: "In just which far-off galaxy has Mansfield set up his telescope to scrutinize the doings of us earthlings?”

Mansfield’s book, whose port-and-pipesmoke fantasy of masculinity was itself at least four decades out of date, was hopelessly wrong for an era defined by Truck Nutz and George W. Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished" to an audience of hooting cable news hosts. Challenged in an interview with the *New York Times'* Deborah Solomon to name a manly physical pursuit, Mansfield cited opening jars and moving furniture for his wife. How often did he really move furniture, Solomon pressed. “Not every night,” he replied, “but routinely.”

Mansfield was by no means the first fusty old professor to grouse about female troubles—men like him have been grumbling since before women’s studies made a beachhead at San Diego State in the early '70s.But Manliness was written for a popular audience, and it was one of the earliest salvos in a cottage industry dedicated to saving young males from the ravishments of a culture that had either abandoned genders or created too many, depending on whom you ask. The decade or so since has seen the emergence of a self-proclaimed counterrevolution to the conjoined scourges of gay rights, feminism and preferred pronouns. It includes elbow-patched academics, self-proclaimed men’s rights activists, and the vitamin scammers of the so-called alt-right.

It includes Jordan Peterson.

I thought of Kirn’s question when I took a tentative dip into Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The first rule is “stand up straight with your shoulders back,” which Peterson’s voluminous videography suggests he obeys only intermittently. The chapter on this first rule begins in a J. Alfred Prufrock mood by comparing humans to lobsters—the manifest complexity of our societies and power politics reduced to the scuttling instincts of arthropods.

Devotees of the pseudoscience of evolutionary psychology are fond of this particular maneuver: locate some behavior in the more ancient branches of the tree of life and project it forward across eons to explain little Johnny pulling little Susie’s pigtails, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, or the Holocaust, or whatever. In any case, I like to imagine the diaphanous, energy-based extraterrestrials in their invisible starships, so unutterably alien that they gaze upon man and lobster and can’t tell them apart.

A professor of no particular scholarly distinction—his previous book was a mashup of Gladwellian pop-neuroscience and Joseph Campbell’s pop-anthropology—Peterson rose to fame by getting angry about pronouns, and he now gives lectures on manly self-sufficiency to roomfuls of barely post-adolescent boys still smarting from the Sadie Hawkins dance. (Because what is more manly than prissy grammatical prescriptivism?) Imagine if Richard Spencer were ghoulishly spliced with Suze Orman, and you'll get the idea. Or you could watch one of the dozens of lectures he's posted to YouTube for his frustrated young acolytes.

Peterson’s shtick—as with most vaguely right-wing intellectual output—is to wander the winding garden path before arriving, quite miraculously, at the very point from which he set out. Your prejudices, it appears, are quite correct, and always have been. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Stand up straight, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, I cannot tell a lie. The vanguard of the counterrevolution is finally mired in the muck of mere platitude. Groucho Marx said it best: “Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.”

...

trump v gillibrand

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/fempire-strikes-back

could tell you stories of other professors, editors, journalists, and TV hosts. But they would be much the same as those we read almost every day now as women go public with their own stories of sexual harassment and worse at the hands of powerful men in the film industry, major media outlets, Silicon Valley, and Congress, among other places. In response, almost every day come new denials, excuses, or half-baked apologies.

Some commentators are now reconsidering Bill Clinton’s record in the sharper light of the present moment. Others ask if the current “witch hunt” for sexual predators has gone too far. Expecting inevitable backlash, some recommend that women exercise restraint -- as all of us have been taught to do for so many eons -- lest some unsubstantiated accusation discredit the stories of thousands of women reporting #MeToo. I don’t share such tender concern for the reputations of men, especially not that of the president, the self-congratulatory pussy-grabber-in-chief whose followers seem to mistake his behavior for the norm, if not an aspirational ideal.

Discussion of these matters quickly becomes political, eliciting erratic, gender-bending partisan judgments. Some prominent Republican men called for former judge Roy Moore of Alabama, accused of harassing and assaulting teenaged girls when he was a 30-something assistant district attorney, to endhis campaign for the Senate, while many Republican women in that state, including many who are presumably the mothers of daughters, continue to stand behind him.

At the same time, Democrats parse which of Bill Clinton’s accusers to believe and which not. And who hasn’t thought again about Clarence Thomas? He was elevated to the Supreme Court by an all-white male Congressional committee despite the thoroughly credible testimony of harassed law professor Anita Hill and the accounts of many other women, similarly violated and ready to testify against Thomas, but never called. Given his long misogynistic history on the court, isn’t it time to look at his testimony again? Did he commit perjury to gain his seat? And if so, what’s to be done about his consistent judicial record inimical to the common interests of women?...

2016

http://www.alternet.org/activism/aclu-joins-menstruation-activism-wave

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2017/03/women-candidates-under-attack/

not good for women:

Outside groups almost always spend more ripping into candidates, as opposed to supporting them, no matter the party or gender. The only two cases that bucked the trend involved spending on third-party candidates: The male running for Senate, Edward Shlikas in Maryland, and two females running for the House (Carla Spalding in Florida and Miranda Allen in Kansas) faced more positive spending than negative.

“They have that role because it largely protects the candidate from having the negativity come from them,” said Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One. “If you’re the candidate, you can build up who you are and what your platform is. You let the outside groups do your dirty work and you can always say, ‘Hey, it wasn’t me.'”

But women, on average, faced more unfavorable spending than men. Of Senate candidates, female Dems faced $3.4 million more on average in negative messaging than males did, while female Republicans faced $2.1 million more in adverse ads compared to their male counterparts.

In the House, the margins were much smaller, but less money was spent overall. Female Democrats running for the House were the subjects of $64,000 more in outside group attacks than their male counterparts, while Republican women saw $65,000 more negativity, on average.

This is abuse, and it is abuse for a particular political purpose. Whether it is under the guise of news or commentary, the fabricated stories bouncing around r/The_Donald, often cloaked in shockingly venomous rhetoric, do not adhere to and cannot be judged by traditional journalistic standards. This type of fake news needs to be understood in tandem with its context and purpose. Some of it is just for profit. But other pieces are intended to serve as weaponized propaganda meant to inspire harassment or even worse.

The “alt-right” movement has been equated to white supremacy and neo-Nazis. That is broadly accurate, but the reality is a bit more complicated. More often than not,the gateway drug for this movement is sexism -- "extreme misogyny evolving from male bonding gone haywire,” as Aja Romano put it for Vox. White nationalism and neo-Nazism often come later.

This framework also explains why the “alt-right” tilts at so many cultural windmills. Whether with boycotts against Star Wars this year, or boycotts against Star Wars last year, or boycotts against *Ghostbusters* or *Hamilton* or other notable events that women and people of color are involved in, the intent of the “alt-right” is not necessarily to be successful in the short run: The protests are intended as a statement of white patriarchy. Anyone talking about the boycott is surreptitiously sharing the message of white, male-centric cultural identity.

Jason Wilson perfectly characterized the misogyny and bigotry of the "alt-right" when describing Yiannopoulos and his tactics:

Yiannopoulos and the alt right certainly shared a couple of traits. First, there was a willingness to dispense with the American right’s trusty dog whistle and offer frank views on race (all the while disparaging those conservatives who were more attuned to euphemism and conciliation as ‘cucks’). Second, they shared a desire to restore white masculinity to its position as the central, reigning political identity.

In Eugene, [OH], Yiannopoulos endorsed Trump’s call to end Muslim immigration on the grounds that fundamentalists ‘want to kill people like me’ – a preview of the full-throated Islamophobic appeal that he and others made to the LGBT community after the Pulse nightclub shooting the next month.

But the meat of his address was a repetition of a claim he has made repeatedly in his writings and on social media: that white men, especially the working class, are being oppressed with an elitist doctrine of political correctness.

Referring to lesbians as ‘horrendous, quivering masses of horror’ and feminism as ‘cancer’, Yiannopoulos generally castigated the ‘awful, awful, terrible, diseased and damaged people lecturing and hectoring the working class’ – those he sees as the enforcers of ‘the oppressive hegemony of social justice’. The only solution, he said, is a Trump administration.

Members of the "alt-right" don't just preach this hatred. They mobilize it. Jesse Singal examined the many similarities the “alt-right”/fake news ecosystem shares with cults, and the role misogyny plays in attracting new members:

But it’s the alt-right concept of so-called red-pillingwhere this subculture appears more similar to “traditional” cults and extremist groups. Adapted from The Matrix, “taking the red pill” or “getting red-pilled” simply means seeing the world as it really is. In the online subcultures that gave rise to the alt-right, its most famous meaning is in reference to feminism:After you take the red pill, the scales fall from your eyes and you can see that feminism is really just an attempt to emasculate and bully men, to allow social-justice warriors to run rampant over masculine (and traditional) values and ideals in favor of a shrill and judgmental far-left radicalism.Recently, the definition has expanded a bit — these days, in an alt-right context “getting red-pilled” probably means something more like “understanding that progressivism is a lie and part of a large-scale effort to hurt you and people like you.” But the basic point is the same: This is the moment at which you start to see things as they really are.

This is exactly the sort of transformative experience offered by cults and extremist movements: After this, things won’t ever be the same for you. After this, you will have a role to play in an important battle that will determine the fate of the world. Your life will take on an enhanced meaning.

At its core, the “alt-right” is just a bunch of men who feel powerless and resent women because of it. That’s why Gamergate is so crucial to understanding the movement; it truly was a galvanizing political event for a fringe movement that far too many mainstream people had overlooked because they were not the ones being harassed.

III. Historical Precedent

ecotopia rising

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/1/6/a_socialist_elected_in_seattle_kshama

seattle and trudeua cabinet mostly women

red pill shooter entitled

magna becomes minor carta

THE FOUNDERS OF COURSE DID NOT INTEND THE TERM “PERSON” TO APPLY TO ALL PERSONS. NATIVE AMERICANS WERE NOT PERSONS. THEIR RIGHTS WERE VIRTUALLY NIL. WOMEN WERE SCARCELY PERSONS. WIVES WERE UNDERSTOOD TO BE “COVERED” UNDER THE CIVIL IDENTITY OF THEIR HUSBANDS IN MUCH THE SAME WAY AS CHILDREN WERE SUBJECT TO THEIR PARENTS. BLACKSTONE’S PRINCIPLES HELD THAT “THE VERY BEING OR LEGAL EXISTENCE OF THE WOMAN IS SUSPENDED DURING THE MARRIAGE, OR AT LEAST IS INCORPORATED AND CONSOLIDATED INTO THAT OF THE HUSBAND: UNDER WHOSE WING, PROTECTION, AND COVER, SHE PERFORMS EVERY THING.” WOMEN ARE THUS THE PROPERTY OF THEIR FATHERS OR HUSBANDS. THESE PRINCIPLES REMAIN UP TO VERY RECENT YEARS. UNTIL A SUPREME COURT**DECISION OF 1975**, WOMEN DID NOT EVEN HAVE A LEGAL RIGHT TO SERVE ON JURIES. THEY WERE NOT PEERS. JUST TWO WEEKS AGO, REPUBLICAN OPPOSITION BLOCKED THE FAIRNESS PAYCHECK ACT GUARANTEEING WOMEN EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK. AND IT GOES FAR BEYOND.

~ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/01/warren-farrell-mens-rights-movement-feminism-misogyny-trolls

economics and gender

http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/economics-and-gender

The Women Who Were Right About the Economy

bigthink

Who could have saved us from the global financial crisis? In a word, women.The release of the Federal Reserve’s transcripts of policymaking meetings up to 2007 has shed new light on the machinations inside the central bank as the Great Recession dawned. One member of the Board of Governorscast in a positive light is Janet Yellen, the vice-chair, who saw the potential for trouble in the shadow banking system. She isn’t the only woman who might have done a better job than the man who outranked her:

Brooksley Born. The formerchair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission warned that the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 could lead to excesses in the derivatives markets. The act eliminated most monitoring and regulation of the over-the-counter derivatives market where the subprime loan crisis exploded. But Born was overruled by Larry Summers, the Treasury secretary, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law.

Alice Rivlin. As vice-chair of the Board of Governors and a possible successor to Alan Greenspan as chair, her resignation in 1999, just as the Fed began to raise interest rates for the first time in four years, came as a surprise. Her view of monetary policy the late 1990s suggests she correctly perceived the global economy as more fragile than Greenspan did; the markets’ crash in 2000 soon forced him to reverse course. She later criticized Greenspan for endorsing the 2001 Bush tax cuts, which ended up casting the nation into deep deficits.

Sheila Bair. She chaired the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation before, during, and after the financial crisis. A strong believer in aiding consumers more and big banks less, she dissented from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s view that bailing out big banks – some of which she said didn’t need the help – was the best way to get the economy back on its feet. She argued for more accountability, but she lost; the big banks got their money, with few strings attached.

Christina Romer. The first chair of President Barak Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers wanted a much bigger stimulus package than the one he eventually proposed to Congress in 2009 - $1.8 trillion rather than about $900 billion. But before Obama even saw the plan, Summers, who was director of the National Economic Council, persuaded her to water it down to $1.2 trillion. The shortcomings of the initial package led Obama to pursue additional stimulus, an effort largely stymied by the Republicans in the Congress.

Would we be better off today if these women had held the top jobs in economic policy rather than the men who steamrolled them? There’s no way to know for sure, but my guess is that, in at least a few cases, the answer is yes.

The Guardian [1] / By Edward Helmore [2]

Female CEOs More Likely to Get Fired

May 17, 2014 |

The perception that high-achieving businesswomen are more vulnerable than their male counterparts to being abruptly fired – pushed off the "glass cliff" in the contemporary corporate vernacular – has been borne out by a new study from a global management consultancy.

Researchers at Strategy&, formerly known as Booz & Company, found that women are forced out of chief executive positions more than a third of the time, while only a quarter of men in similar positions suffer the same fate.

The precarious position of women in the highest echelons of power – illustrated last week by the dramatic departures of Jill Abramson [3] andNatalie Nougayrède [4] as the editors of the New York Times and Le Monde– remains a stubborn fact of corporate life.

According to the authors of the 2013 Chief Executive Study [5], women' higher rate of failure is not because they are placed in more challenging roles or set up to fail. The research looked at CEO turnover over the past decade at the top of the world's 2,500 largest public companies and found that, while women represent only 3% of new CEOs, they are often forced out of top jobs sooner.

The report finds that men and women are broadly comparable in every area –except one: "Women are more often outsiders," says co-author Ken Favaro. "So they're more vulnerable. They don't know the organisation. They can't diagnose the problems as quickly and don't understand the culture or how to get it to work for them – and they aren't necessarily given more time to deliver."

While the proportion of women in the CEO class has doubled to nearly 4% in the past five years, a figure that the study's authors believe could rise to 33% by 2040, the gender norms of global corporate leadership remain stubbornly hard to shift.

With a smaller internal leadership pool to choose from, companies hiring female executives from outside are also likely to be less tolerant of shortcomings than they are with executives groomed in-house. And external CEOs are seven times more likely to be dismissed after a short tenure.

"We tend to like those that are most like us," says Favaro. "Sadly, company boards are still mostly men, and they're more inclined to pull the trigger on women if things aren't working out. Women are treated more harshly by men because there are more men in the boardroom." As long as this lasts, he adds, "women will be at a disadvantage".

Last week, after claims that Abramson was paid significantly less than her male predecessor at the New York Times [6] had been challenged by the owning Sulzberger family [7], reasons for her dismissal fell back on cliches no less likely to cause offence. Abramson was described as "bossy" – a term that, at least in the US, is loaded with sexist hostility.

Earlier this year Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg [8]launched a campaign to stamp out the word, claiming that it discourages young women from developing leadership skills. "I'm not bossy. I'm the boss," announced Beyoncé in one of Sandberg's anti-bossy TV adverts. The same issue appears to have brought down Nougayrède, who had covered the Chechen wars for Le Monde [9]before being forced out by a staff insurrection at the paper.

Faced with such treatment, many female CEOs are choosing to not go quietly over the glass cliff. In 2009, Carol Bartz became chief executive of Yahoo!, but her appointment was viewed less as a victory for women than as evidence that women are more willing to accept positions at companies with no future – and then take the fall. After Bartz was fired two years later, she characterised Yahoo!'s board as "doofuses" who "fucked me over".

While the authors of Strategy&'s report refuse to comment specifically on the saga at the New York Times, Favaro believes that Abramson's experience at the paper was "not inconsistent" with its findings: "She wasn't given a whole lot of time to develop her track record and earn her tenure."

Gary Neilson, another co-author of the report, believes the data, though thin, shows an improving situation. While women may be forced out of companies faster, they are coming in faster than they are going out.

Neilson believes that as companies start to do a better job of developing internal female executive talent, they will be less likely to look outside to fill top positions. That, in turn, will reduce the risk that women are taking top jobs at companies that may already be in crisis, experiencing performance problems or be in transition.

In 20 years this is all going to be quite different, says Neilsen. As more women come through the school system, move up the corporate ladder and sit on boards, companies will have a stable source of homegrown talent.

"The data is clear – being an outsider is a tough situation," he says. Companies care about performance, their boards are under pressure, so they need to be doing a better job developing female talent internally. The situation is, he says, improving rapidly – "but from a very small base".

See more stories tagged with:

ceo [11],

women [12],

workplace [13]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/gender/female-ceos-more-likely-get-fired