Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

"In 2015 a sixth-grade girl named Madeline Messer analyzed the fifty most popular "endless runner game" apps and found that 98% came with built-in boy characters, compared with only 46% that offered girl characters. The real kicker, however, was that in 90% of the games, the male characters were free, whereas 85% of the games charged extra for the ability to select a female character." (continued)

"Even as the wage gap slowly closes, particularly for women without children, the wealth gap remains immense: women's earnings are now, on average, 78% of men's, but women have only 36% as much wealth." I wonder why that is.

"Women who see their roles exclusively as "nurturers" and "supporters" tacitly trade authority and the ability to work as peers for safety and the responsibilities of traditional roles."

"Benevolent sexism, also known as ambivalent sexism, is tricky because it broadcasts the "special" value of women and the "protective" strength of men."

"In 2012, social psychologist Corinne Moss-Racusin asked science faculty members to evaluate two fabricated applicants, both with the same skills and tenure, for a lab manager opening. One candidate was "Jennifer," and the other "John." Fake John was considered more competent by reviewers and offered, on average, $4000 more annually to start the job."

"In 2015 the hashtag #AddMaleAuthor trended after Fiona Ingleby, a geneticist, publicly shared an absurdly sexist peer review of her work. The reviewer, a man, suggested that adding a man as a coauthor to a paper she'd coauthored with another woman would "serve as a possible check against interpretations that may sometimes be drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions.""

"In 2015 mathematician Greg Martin conducted an in-depth statistical analysis showing how overwhelmingly improbable it is today that all-male panels occur randomly."

p 159 - "between 1992 and 2011, more than 94 percent of people conducting peace negotiations around the world have been men, even tough it is a long-standing and well-established fact that gender-inclusive negotiations result in more successful and lasting peace."

p 157 - "A man who introduces a topic on a listserv gets higher rates of response and debate than a woman does. On Twitter, men's tweets are retweeted twice as often as women's."

"Observations of children on playgrounds also show that despite girls' earlier language acquisition, by age six, boys dominate chatter with adult encouragement."

p 154 - "Women contend all the time with people assuming we are assistants. If we are black or brown, we are further assumed to be "cleaning ladies" and janitors."

p 150 - "Myrna Dawson... has studied what happens to men who kill women family members and found that they receive shorter prison sentences compared with men who kill strangers." I would be interested to see how this compares to men who kill male family members.

p 147 - "Men in traditional relationships are more aggressive, angry, and contemptuous toward women than those in more egalitarian unions." YIKES.

"Women, too, experience faster pulses and elevated blood pressure, but their bodies... produce two different chemicals: endorphins and oxytocin, which lead to "tend-and-befriend" behaviors. Women become more affiliative and appear to be friendly. "Fight or flight" is the "normal" response if you are a man, yet it is the standard to which women are held." It's VERY common for male experience to be used as default.

p 146 - "In 2000, UCLA professor and social psychologist Shelley Taylor and her colleagues showed that when men and women encounter stress and threats, their actual physical reactions differ. Men's bodies release the chemicals norepinephrine and cortisol, which prompt fight-or-flight behaviors." (continued)

p 145 - "In the wake of a 2015 terrorist attack in Paris, assaults of Muslim girls and women in the United Kingdom made up the vast majority of the 300 percent spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes and yet governments and the media continue to ignore the impact of gender when categorizing hate."

p 144 - "for years, Gallup has found double-digit "safety gaps" between men and women. "Most Americans continue to feel safe in their immediate communities," researchers at Gallup explained in a 2014 release of an annual crime survey.... the reality [is] that half of women, 45 percent, say they DO NOT feel safe compared to 73 percent of men reported that they DO."

p 142 - "Entire franchises are built around violence against women as entertainment... in truth, there is no escaping them. All you have to do is glance at a newspaper or online news source."

p 139 - "The single most accurate predictor of violent crime is a man's felony domestic violence conviction."

p 139 - "in city after city across the United States hundreds of thousands of rape kits, gathered over decades and critical to identifying serial offenders, continue to sit, languishing, untested, and rotting, in police facilities across the country." Shows priorities pretty clearly.

p 135 - "college students surveyed... believe that up to 50% of women lie about being raped. Other studies similarly show that police officers with fewer than eight years of experience also believe roughly that percentage of those alleging rape are lying... This doubt remains true despite studies... consistently finding that the incidence of false rape claims ranges from just 2% to 8%... the same as... other crime."

p 133 - "One in three Native American women in the United States will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, for example. Native American girls and women are the only demographic cohort more likely to be assaulted by men outside of their own ethnic group."

p 133 - "Perpetrators [of sexual assault] are overwhelmingly male."

p 132 - "A woman's chance of being sexually assaulted in her lifetime is one in five. For men, it's one in seventy-seven."

P 123 - “I know many girls who are flattered when they are first harassed and even more women who bemoan the loss of attention as they age. But behind it all, we can’t truly know which men are harmless. And the cost of being wrong is high.”

p 116 - “When having a baby is seen as a type of success, then not having a baby is a failure that can fill us with feelings of inadequacy.”

p 111-112 - “A 2015 study found that more than 95 percent of women who had ended pregnancies didn’t regret their decision. Only 5 percent reported feeling guilt, sadness or anger. Giving up a child for adoption is significantly more stressful and traumatizing to women, with 95 percent of those who gave up their babies experiencing sadness, guilt, and grief that persist for decades.”

p 100-101 - "Compared with childless women, mothers are offered an average of $11,000 less when they get a new job. For every child a woman has, she faces a wage decline of -7.8 percent per child, and it's cumulative."

p 100 - "Some women continue to hide pregnancies from employers as long as they can in the knowledge that, despite the law, pregnancy discrimination remains a potent reality and is, in fact, the leading edge of wider maternity discrimination."

The "husband stitch." Is this even still a thing? Because it's disgusting and horrific and BAD. It is medically unnecessary. It is harmful to the patient. NO NO NO.