A daily dose of odds and sods, some interesting, some bizarre, some funny, some thought provoking items which I have stumbled across the web. All to be taken with a grain of daily salt!!
Quite an interesting topic son. And nothing to be embarrassed about. You'll face this if you haven't done already. From an economic perspective, think about the fact that improvement in handling menstruation for women can help them be more productive. Unlike in countries in India where they are locked up for the duration of their periods. Or they cannot work properly because of lack of tampons or pads or what have you. Truly ridiculous.
You have to learn to be sensitive about this son. Women have interesting reactions to their periods and men interested in this. Heck there are apps out there which track a woman's periods so that men can manage their behaviour around them during this time. Some women have strong reactions mentally physically sexually or what have you. Some don't. It's a matter of delicacy. Their biochemical balance changes and one should learn about how and what and where. No rules son, you just have to be cognisant of this and be there for your girl. Hugs and cuddles help along with a thick skin.
SASIMOTO / Shutterstock / Kara Gordon / The Atlantic
On Aug. 18, 2011, a thread titled “I design tampons. AMA!” appeared on the news-conversation website Reddit. Hosted by a user named “karnim” who identified himself only as a college-aged male research-and-development intern at one of the “big three” tampon brands (Tampax, Kotex, and Playtex), the thread began with a polite invitation to “ask me anything” (AMA) and a disclaimer. “Much of my work is confidential, so I can't give details about my projects,” karnim wrote, but he could answer “overall” questions about tampons.
In the grander canon of AMA threads—online Q&A sessions hosted by Reddit users with compelling life stories or careers—karnim’s wasn’t the most glamorous or flashy. President Obama, for example, participated in an AMA in 2012. But karnim soon found himself avalanched with reader questions about tampon technology, ranging from the curious (“Why don't they just stop making the cardboard ones?”) to the wisecracking (“Can you make medicated tampons to make women stop actin’ fool when they get their menses?”) to the imploring (“Can you please make tampons with a black or flesh-coloured string? Please?” “How about one that you can leave in for 10 hours and not worry about it?”).
Ten hours later, karnim ended his IAmA, exhausted. “Sorry y'all, but it's been 10 hours, and the questions just keep coming. I need a break.”
There are two ways of looking at this problem son. Well three ways. When you and Diya were born, I didn't have parental leave. And mamma didn't work so the question of leave didn't exist. But if fathers leave was available, then I would have loved to take it. Spend more time with you. When you have your kids, son, make sure you take the full amount. Don't worry about the future son. Or career. The time you spend with your new born baby and your wife is so precious that it will keep on giving you happiness through your entire life time. Secondly, there's the USA situation. I find it very strange that USA doesn't do it and it's not mandatory like in other countries. Very strange. Then again there's no demographic pressure either. Their birth rates are good. But the republicans are a dying breed anyway so entropy will take care of the nay Sayers.
Thirdly as an economist, you will know that this has a cost. Paid parental leave means that the company gets hit twice. First with the loss of the mother's time and then the cost of maternity cover or if the role isn't covered, then lack of productivity. This, when aggregated, means there is a cost of this. Sometimes it can be handled. Sometimes it can't and ends up being very painful. So the studies that this article talks about say there's no impact. Or they couldn't measure it. Or they were able to manage the impact. Finally remember that the unmarried people in the office have started to complain. Why should they bear the cost of somebody who is taking a lifestyle choice? It's a fair question. Difficult decisions son. When you will become a manager, you'll have to deal with these questions. Missing you. And remembering the bestest day in my life when you were placed in my arms :) Love you Baba The Real War on Families: Why the U.S. Needs Paid Leave Now http://inthesetimes.com/article/18151/the-real-war-on-families (via Instapaper) Each one of these women went back to work less than two months after giving birth due to the financial toll of unpaid maternity leave. (Kate Milford)
Benrahou had to attend to another crisis: she was the mother of a very sick baby, and her carefully constructed paid maternity leave had disintegrated.
Leigh Benrahou began laying plans to have a second child almost as soon as she had her first, a daughter named Johara, in 2011. Benrahou, 32, wanted to time the next birth so that when she returned to work, her mother, who works at an elementary school and has summers off, could babysit. Most importantly, Benrahou wanted to spend as much time as she could with her new baby while also keeping her relatively new job as the registrar at a small college.
While her husband, Rachid, 38, earns enough at a carpet cleaning company to cover their mortgage and food, without her paycheck they'd be forced to live close to the bone. And if she quit her job, Benrahou, who has a masters in nonprofit management, would take a big step backward in what she hoped would be a long career in higher education.
So Benrahou, who has wavy dark blond hair, blue eyes and a tendency to smile even through difficult moments, set about what may be the least romantic aspect of family planning in the United States: figuring out how to maximize time with a newborn while staying solvent, employed and, ideally, sane.
Only in America
Most people are aware that Americans have a raw deal when it comes to maternity leave. Perhaps they've heard about Sweden, with its drool-inducing 16 months of paid parental leave, or Finland, where, after about 9 months of paid leave, the mother or father can take—or split—additional paid "child care leave" until the child's third birthday.
But most Americans don't realize quite how out of step we are. It's not just wealthy, social democratic Nordic countries that make us look bad. With the exception of a few small countries like Papua New Guinea and Suriname, every other nation in the world—rich or poor—now requires paid maternity leave.
Paid parental leave frees mothers and fathers from choosing between their careers and time with their infants. For women, still most often the primary caregivers of young children, this results in higher employment rates, which in turn translates to lower poverty rates among mothers and their children.
Research shows that paid leave can also be a matter of life and death for children. By charting the correlation between death rates and paid leave in 16 European countries, Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, found that a 50-week extension in paid leave was associated with a 20 percent dip in infant deaths. (The biggest drop was in deaths of babies between 1 month and 1 year old, though mortality of children between 1 and 5 years also decreased as paid leave went up.)
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 13 percent of U.S. workers have access to any form of paid family leave, which includes parental leave and other time off to care for a family member. The highest-paid workers are most likely to have it, according to BLS numbers, with more than 1 in 5 of the top 10 percent of earners getting paid family leave, compared to 1 in 20 in the bottom quartile. Unionized workers are more likely to get benefits than nonunionized workers.
What do the rest of American women do without a law that guarantees this basic support? Some new mothers who don't get paid leave quit their jobs, which can leave them desperate for income and have serious consequences in terms of work opportunities and lifetime earnings. Others may choose not to have children (though it's impossible to definitively quantify how the difficulty of integrating work and childbirth factors into those decisions). And some try to stitch together their own paid leaves through accumulated vacation time and personal days, or through independently purchased insurance policies.
The best-laid plans
Though her employer doesn't offer paid leave, Benrahou figured she'd create her own, taking time away from work through the Family and Medical Leave Act, which entitles new parents to up to 12 weeks off, unpaid. She knew all about the law's loopholes—that, for instance, it only applies to workplaces that have at least 50 employees. Hers did; she wouldn't have taken the job if it hadn't. She knew, too, that she had to have worked for her employer for at least 12 months to qualify. That part was trickier.
She had started her job in February 2014, which meant that she wouldn't qualify until the following February. She counted back nine months from then and got to May, but then, to be safe, tacked on another two months in case the baby came early, so: July. That's when she and Rachid would start trying for a second.
Then there was money. Reluctant to lose 12 weeks of income, Benrahou decided to opt into her employer's disability insurance policy, paying roughly $40 a month into the plan so she could receive 60 percent of her salary for up to six weeks of her maternity leave, plus an additional $1,000 toward the cost of her hospital stay. She would also save up her two weeks of annual paid vacation time.
Numbers crunched and policy purchased, Benrahou went off birth control on schedule in July and became pregnant within a month. But her carefully laid plans started to go awry in her 20th week, when she was diagnosed with placenta previa, which can result in early delivery. Despite some bleeding and cramping, and several brief hospital stays that used up her sick days, Benrahou stuck to her plan, working as much as possible after her diagnosis in order to save her precious vacation time. But, in late December, her water broke. Though her due date was April 1, Leigh Benrahou gave birth by C-section on Christmas Eve—too soon to qualify for FMLA leave or any payoff from her disability insurance.
Ramzi Benrahou was born at 26 weeks and just over 2 pounds. Knowing that 20 percent of babies born at his gestational age don't survive, Leigh spent the first hours after the delivery singularly focused on her tiny son's survival. He needed oxygen, since his lungs weren't fully developed. And, when he was whisked away for medical attention, Benrahou had to attend to another crisis: She was the mother of a very sick baby, and her carefully constructed paid maternity leave had disintegrated. So, freshly stitched up and still groggy from anesthesia, she spread out her medical fact sheets, insurance policy papers and lists of phone numbers on her hospital bed and began to grapple with her new reality. Though her college was on winter break, which put off her return by about a week, Benrahou realized she'd have to go back to work when classes resumed on January 6, less than two weeks after giving birth.
Less than a month
Like Benrahou, most U.S. women end up returning to work sooner than they'd like—sometimes just weeks or days after having a baby. Just how soon they're going back is difficult to determine. We know that most employers don't offer paid leave, but no federal agency collects regular statistics on how much post-childbirth time off, paid or unpaid, women are actually taking.
Census data on employment patterns among first-time mothers show that between 2005 and 2007, more than half who worked during their pregnancy were back on the job within three months of giving birth. A 2008 study by the Department of Health and Human Services' Maternal and Child Health Bureau, meanwhile, found that the average length of maternity leave, when taken, was 10 weeks. But more recent data is scarce, even though the recession left many women living on razorthin margins, ratcheting up the pressure to rush back to work after giving birth.
How are new mothers faring in today's age of austerity? Data analyzed for In These Times by Abt Associates, a research and evaluation company, provides a window into these experiences. Abt went back to a 2012 survey it conducted for the Department of Labor of 2,852 employees who had taken family or medical leave in the last year, looking specifically at the 93 women who took time off work to care for a new baby.
Nearly 12 percent of those women took off only a week or less. Another 11 percent took between one and two weeks off. That means that about 23 percent—nearly 1 in 4—of the women interviewed were back at work within two weeks of having a child.
The educational divide between those who took shorter and relatively longer leaves is striking: 80 percent of college graduates took at least six weeks off to care for a new baby, but only 54 percent of women without college degrees did so.
Pumping in the parking lot
What's it like to be back on the job in the first weeks after having a baby?
For Natasha Long, who was back three weeks after her third child, Jayden, was born in 2012, the worst part was missing out on bonding time with her son.
Long, who was 29 at the time, was determined to make sure Jayden got breast milk. But the factory where she worked, ACCO Office Supplies in Booneville, Mississippi, didn't have a lactation room. So when she was on breaks, she had to run out to her truck. She sat in the cab, worried that someone might see her, and pumped, while tears rolled down her face and over the plastic suction cups attached to her breasts.
Long cried because she wanted to be holding her baby rather than sitting in the parking lot of a factory in her old Yukon Denali. But exhaustion clearly also played a role in her emotional state. Her job was simple—to place stickers with the company logo on the bottom right-hand corner of plastic binders and then box up the binders. But the shifts were long—from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.—and she put in four or five a week. Because the factory was an hour's drive from her home in Okalona, Mississippi, Long had only 10 hours left in the day to do everything else, including tend to her three children, spend time with Jayden's father, and sleep. By the time she got back in the evening, her children, who were being looked after by her father during the day, were on their way to bed. To pump breast milk before leaving for work, she had to get up at 4 a.m.
After just a few days of this crazed schedule, Long began to develop strange symptoms, including a headache that never seemed to go away and a choking sensation that left her feeling breathless. She started biting her fingernails to the quick—something she'd never done before—and crying a lot. "I felt like I was alone," says Long. "I wanted to fall off the face of the earth." Long had never been depressed. But when she went to the doctor, he surmised that her physical symptoms were rooted in her mental state, which was itself rooted in her schedule. When her doctor said he thought she was depressed, Long worried that if child welfare authorities found out, they might take her children away. She had seen other people's children put in foster care. But when her doctor prescribed her antidepressants, she took them.
Long is not the only one to suffer emotionally from a quick return to work. Research has shown that longer maternity leaves, whether paid or unpaid, are associated with a decline in depressive symptoms, a reduction in the likelihood of severe depression, and an improvement in overall maternal health, according to a working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research. One national study of 1,762 mothers found that a one-week increase in maternity leave was associated with a 5 to 6 percent reduction in depressive symptoms from six to 24 months after birth. Another found that women who took less than eight weeks of paid leave experienced more depression than those who had longer leaves and were in worse health overall. Mothers who work more than 40 hours a week, as Long was, were more likely to be depressed than those who worked 40 hours or less, according to a study by Child Trends, a research center.
Women who go back sooner also tend to breastfeed less, which cuts into the benefits breast milk confers, including better immunity and lower rates of childhood obesity, allergies and sudden infant death syndrome. It was only through heroic efforts that Long was able to breastfeed Jayden until he was 1.
Shorter maternity leaves may also have a negative effect on the development of early motor and social skills and even, later, on vocabulary, according to several studies. So far, Jayden, 3, hasn't shown signs of missing any developmental milestones. What nags at Long is the thought that her absence in those first few months might have affected their relationship. He refuses to call her "mama," and although there's no research to indicate this would be a result of failed early bonding, she still fears that's the reason.
Too busy to fight
For low-income women, the lack of paid maternity leave is just one of many missing supports to help them stay afloat while bringing new life into the world. By the time Jayden was born, pregnancy had already put Long in a perilous financial situation. She was on bed rest for the last four and a half months of her pregnancy. Big Dollar, where she worked at the time, didn't fire her for not coming in—but it didn't pay her, either. So Long filed for public assistance, which required her to attend classes. Though Mississippi is supposed to exempt people who are physically unable to take such classes, and Long's doctor had warned her to stay off her feet, she says she was denied benefits when she didn't attend.
Family members pitched in to pay for her groceries and rent while she was unable to work, but by the time Jayden was born (healthy, at 37 weeks), Long knew she had reached the limit of their generosity. When she went back to work at the dollar store, they offered her only reduced hours. It wasn't enough to repay her debts, so she went to an employment agency, made no mention of her days-old baby, and got her job at ACCO.
Other social supports are glaringly absent for U.S. mothers, especially poor ones, who fill waiting lists for scarce subsidized childcare spots and underfunded early education classes. In comparison, Sweden and Denmark spend roughly 10 times what we do on childcare per person.
Without adequate options or support, low-income workers, who are more likely to live paycheck to paycheck and less likely to have access to any type of leave, often have little choice but to power through. As our data confirm—and as finances dictate—less educated women, who tend to have lower-paying jobs, are likely to take less time off after having children. Often, that means not just going back to work early, but going back to very long work hours, very early.
Raven Osborne, for instance, a 22-year-old single mother in Tupelo, Mississippi, went back to work just one week after her first child, Kylan, now 2, was born in August 2013. In addition to being a full-time college student, Osborne was waitressing full-time at IHOP, but her earnings—tips plus a base salary of $2.13 an hour—weren't enough to cover her rent, car payments and daycare costs. Perhaps ironically, her tips were much higher—sometimes more than $100 a shift—when she was visibly pregnant. But once she had the child, they went down again, so Osborne added a few overnight shifts at Texaco when Kylan was four weeks old, leaving the baby with his grandmother. Working upwards of 60 hours each week, the new mother barely saw her son, except when she got home from work, when she often fell asleep holding him. She could have taken unpaid leave from IHOP but chose not to because she needed the pay.
This winter, Osborne returned to work four weeks after her second child, Anthony, was born. Now she's working full-time at a debt collection agency on top of several shifts at the nearby Coles supermarket.
"I don't like asking for help" is how Osborne explains the frantic pace she's kept up during her first year-and-a-half of motherhood. Her mother pitches in by watching the kids when she can, though she, too, has two full-time jobs—one at Walmart and another as an aide at a retirement community.
Clearly, women with low earnings are the least likely to have a financial cushion that allows them to forgo a paycheck. But it's not only those on the bottom of the pay scale who can't afford to take unpaid leave. More than 2.5 million employees need time off from work to care for themselves or another but can't afford to take it, according to a 2012 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Tracy Malloy-Curtis, a fundraiser at a nonprofit in New York City, could have taken more time off, unpaid but with job security, after she had a baby a few years back. ("It's a civil rights organization," she explains, though she doesn't want to name it because she still works in the field.) Instead, Malloy-Curtis, who is 43, married, and the primary breadwinner in her family, went back five and a half weeks after having a son—and a complicated C-section—for fear she otherwise could not afford to pay her mortgage and cover the other basic costs of her life.
"Physically, I was a wreck," she says. An infection around her C-section wound hadn't yet healed when she went back to work. "I was still bleeding, my incision wasn't closed." Pus dripped down her leg under her work clothes.
Those who do take leave may find themselves penalized afterward. Jackie Wheeler took six weeks of paid maternity leave after her son, Enzo, was born in 2011. Wheeler, who lives in Westminster, Colo., was working at the front desk of a local branch of Chase Bank. Though her son had severe medical problems as a result of being born early, Wheeler had intended to go back to her job. Before giving birth, she says, she had even been talking with her boss about interviewing for an assistant manager position. "I saw myself as moving along in the company," she says.
But after she returned to work and Enzo was released from the hospital, she took another six weeks of leave. At that point, her boss told her he thought it was best that she resign—if he didn't fill her position right away, he said, corporate headquarters would eliminate it. And Wheeler was too overwhelmed at the time to challenge him.
The birth of hope
While, in the United States, the lack of time off can too often turn new motherhood into a distressing ordeal, most other cultures treat this immediate post-natal period as a sacred time, when both the new mother and baby receive help and special attention. Throughout history and all over the world, people have tended to carve out a minimum of at least six weeks in which women are exempt from responsibilities other than child care, according to Malin Eberhard-Gran, a Norwegian public health scholar who has compiled a cross-cultural comparison of post-natal practices.
In some Muslim traditions, new mothers spend the first 40 days after birth in their mothers' homes, for instance. Many Latin American cultures also bracket during the same period, known as la cuarantena (from the Spanish word for "forty"), and exempt women from work responsibilities. In some other countries, women are granted special treatment for even longer. Traditionally, women in Japan and India go to their mothers' homes for several months after giving birth. And today, by law, the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—democracies with market economies—provide an average of more than a year of paid leave.
Here in the United States, advocates have been fighting for a century to get new parents just a few weeks off with pay. But the tide may be turning. In 2002, California became the first state to pass a paid family leave law, which provides workers who need to care for a new baby with 55 percent of their usual weekly pay, to a limit of $1,104 for up to six weeks. New Jersey passed a similar law in 2008. And in 2013, Rhode Island granted workers up to four weeks off with pay for "family care," including care of a new baby. Despite dire warnings from business interests, most employers in New Jersey and California (where programs have been in effect long enough to be studied) haven't found that paid leave has hurt productivity, profitability or turnover. (Full disclosure: I was a co-author of the New Jersey study).
The Obama administration is attempting to build momentum for paid sick leave, one of the main ways women piece together paid maternity leave. In the 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to send him a bill guaranteeing U.S. workers seven days of paid sick leave—but in early August, Senate Republicans blocked a Democrat-sponsored bill to do so. In the meantime, Obama has an executive order in the works that will extend a week of paid sick leave to all federal contractors, and his adminstration has issued $1.25 million in grants to study how paid leave programs can be developed in states. Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has been outspoken on the issue, has spearheaded a #leadonleave campaign, in which he and White House aide Valerie Jarrett travel the country to boost local paid leave policies.
But, so far, even a Democratic administration committed to the issue hasn't been enough to overcome resistance to it. When bills have been debated in states, Republicans have been so vehement that paid leave is bad for business and a "job killer" that legislation at a federal level has been assumed to be a no-go. And, at least until very recently, congressional Republicans have mostly scoffed at Democratic efforts. But for the first time, a bill proposed by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) this spring that would provide benefits for workers who take time off to care for a new baby or sick family member was met with a counterproposal from Republicans, which would allow hourly workers to put overtime toward paid leave.
The issue is also clearly gaining ground in certain states, where at least ten family leave proposals have been introduced since March. Though Republican presidential candidates have had little to say about the issue, Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have both come out as strong proponents of paid leave. While Sanders has been more specific about his plan, calling for 12 weeks off, with pay, both are making a moral case to which there is no politically sound retort: Families need paid time off to take care of their new babies. Men, women and children will gain from this basic human dignity.
Barreling ahead
After three months, Leigh Benrahou only has a blurry recollection of her first weeks back at work just days after her premature son was born. "I remember walking really slow and wearing stretch pants and just making it happen," she says hazily. She spent those early days cutting a path between the college; the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where Ramzi spent four months and underwent two stomach surgeries; her 3-year-old daughter's daycare center; and her home, where, despite her exhaustion, she found it difficult to sleep.
At work, Benrahou tended to the needs of her students, whose questions about enrollment requirements and course changes occasionally provided distraction from her own, far graver problems. But mostly it was surreal—and painful—to be there. Climbing stairs was difficult because of her recent surgery. And pretty much every time she closed the door to pump breast milk, she wound up crying. Harder still was being away from her tiny baby, whose health was still so uncertain. Every time she got a call from the hospital when she was at work—and there were many—her stomach clutched.
"They say it's like being on a roller coaster, [having a child] in the NICU," says Benrahou. "But a roller coaster is fun. I wanted to throw up all the time."
Benrahou didn't throw up, though. Instead, like so many other American women, she barreled ahead, doing her best to both take care of her newborn and remain employed. Though she never got to take leave when and how she had planned, she was recently able to take 12 weeks off through the FMLA under the category of caring for a sick relative—in this case, her infant son. And now the woman who so painstakingly planned her family's future doesn't know what's ahead. Ramzi's long-term prognosis is unclear; he's still on oxygen and has a feeding tube. About a quarter of babies born at 26 weeks go on to have lasting disabilities.
Benrahou's hope is to keep working. And mostly she remains upbeat. But sometimes she can't help but wonder whether Ramzi's early birth was preventable; and whether continuing to work after her diagnosis so she could make the best of her miniscule amount of time off brought about Ramzi's early delivery. It certainly wasn't the way she planned it. This article was supported by the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting.
We will face this problem more and more. I have heard so much from so many people that boys are useless idiots as far as looking after the parental units are concerned. Its the daughters who help look after the old folks. But people don't think about the impact this has on the daughters. One way of seeing this is to see if this has any mental health issues. This obviously means that the health care and social care sectors of the country have to worry about it. Also for the old fogeys, please put aside sufficient money so that you have proper support in a care home or with nursing, or what have you. You have already managed to bugger it up with loading debt on them but one to think deeply..
2. Is caring for elderly parents detrimental to women’s mental health? The influence of the European North-South gradient Date: 2013-11 By: Elenka Brenna (Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore ) ; Cinzia Di Novi (Università Ca’ Foscari, Dipartimento di Economia, Venezia ) In the last decades, both the lengthening of life expectancy and an accentuated decline in birth rates have reduced the consistency of the younger generational cohorts. Due to an ageing population, the burden of care giving is expected to intensify in the next quarter of the century in Europe, especially for mature women. This paper investigates the impact of the provision of constant care for elderly parents on the mental health of adult daughters, between the ages of 50 and 65, living in different European countries. Data is collected from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Information on mental health status is provided by Euro-D depression scale, a standardized measure of depression employed across European countries. We focus on differences in the effects according to a North–South gradient: we test whether the relationship between informal caregiving and mental health differs across European macro- regions. Our results reveal the presence of a North-South gradient in the effect of caring on women’s mental health. Keywords: caregiver burden, depression, parent care, LTC systems, mature women JEL: I10 I12 D10 URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctc:serie1:def004&r=age
Abstract Parental involvement in matchmaking may distort the choice of spouse because parents are willing to substitute love for market and household production, which are more sharable between parents and their children. This paper finds supportive evidence in a survey of Chinese couples. In both rural and urban areas, parent matchmaking is associated with less marital harmony between the couple, more submissive wives, and a stronger belief in old age support for the son. In contrast, its association with couple income differs by rural and urban regions, perhaps because of differences in earning opportunities and in the enforcement of the one-child policy. Moreover, parent matchmaking is associated with more children for the couple and lower schooling for wives only in rural areas. Thus, in places with a stronger need for old age support, parents tend to be involved in matchmaking and use it to select submissive daughters-in-law to ensure old age support. The results render support to Becker, Murphy and Spenckuch (2015), who imply that parents would meddle with children's preferences to ensure their commitment to providing old age support. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/02/23950160/null
whilst this was a Chinese study, based upon the little I know of many traditional societies in Asia, Africa and also Latin America, this definitely has legs to stand true. It makes perfect sense. I have heard so many times that people look at their kids as their pensions. That’s the inter-generational compact if you will. One more reason perhaps why some mother in law’s in India are terrible to their daughter in laws despite the fact that they were also subject to similar inhumane treatment when they were daughter in laws.
Abortion is a right that I fully support. Totally without reservations. Men cannot and will not ever understand what women go through pregnancy and the reasons women like to go ahead or terminate are their’s to decide. All you can do is to hold their hands and pray for the best. Don't ask too many questions. Just be there for her. Whatever she decides and whatever you feel. It's not for you to debate this.
It's heart wrenching for the man as well but you can deal with it. It's not important when you compare with what the woman is going through son.
Just be there. Rub their backs. Get icecream for them. Quietly listen to them biting your head off.
I had only a minute while I waited for the doctor to meet my patient. I grabbed a plastic cup and a pregnancy test from the lab and slipped into the bathroom. This is one of the perks of working at an abortion clinic – all the pregnancy tests you can take. My husband Jeff and I had been trying to get pregnant with our second child. But every month when I placed those two drops of urine into the reservoir, the results had been the same. One stripe. Negative. I steeled myself for the same.
I stood at the bathroom sink, watching. The two minutes it takes for the sample to travel from reservoir to top of the test seemed like hours. Finally, faintly, a second stripe shadowed the first. A thrill shot through me.
I did not shout. I did not run into the hallway to announce to my coworkers my news. I wanted to race to the phone to call Jeff, but I knew I wouldn’t have time before the next surgery, and besides, I wanted to tell him in person. Mostly, I wanted to let the idea sink in. I pressed my hand against my lower belly, as if to give my little zygote a welcoming hug. Still, as happy as I was, I was also afraid.
In 2006, approximately 49% of violent crimes were not reported to police. Being the victim of sexual assault is expensive; each incident imposes an external cost of over $100k on the victim. However, recent estimates of the total social cost are an order of magnitude larger suggesting that from a social welfare standpoint rape is likely to be underreported if the victim's demand for reporting is price elastic. In spite of the centrality of victim reporting in the functioning of the criminal justice system, to date there is very little systematic evidence on what governments can do to encourage victims to report crimes. We estimate the sensitivity of victims to the cost of reporting in an Alaskan city between 1993 and 2006, during which time a chief of police publicly supported a policy of charging victims of sexual assault for medical procedures required to collect evidence against their attackers. Using a triple differences approach that compares trends in reported sexual assaults to other index crimes over time and across Alaskan cities, we estimate that this shift in cost of approximately $1,200 from the city government to victims reduced the number of reported rapes by between 50 and 80%. This large response highlights the importance of public policies which reduce the private cost of reporting crime.
during the days when you hear about so many bloody sexual assaults happening, we have to reduce the costs of the crime for the victim!
this was an interesting book review that I read today…
I quote
The argument of this book is that abortion, including miscarriage by assault and infanticide (p. 5), came to be treated as a “crime” in the modern sense — “wrongdoing requiring lawful retribution from the hands of publicly appointed officials” (p. 4) — in the period 1140–1250 (pp. 1–2). The introduction sets out this thesis and the crucial problematic: when do the sources for law and society in the West first conceptualise a clear distinction between crime on the one hand and wrongdoing that is not criminal, such as “tort” or sin, on the other? It is a debate that has long engaged scholars of medieval canon and English common law.
a fascinating argument. the author talks about abortion being criminalised in the mid 12th century with the rise in the emergence of universities and jurisprudence studies.
As for myself, i am firmly of the belief that its the choice of the mother whether or not to abort. And yes, whilst you can quibble over whether or not at which time period the baby becomes viable, the fact remains that the mother is responsible and accountable. So end of. But curious how this is all religiously mandated. For example, you wouldn't find any of these issues relating to non Judeo Christian backgrounds, at least not that I have read about it. If you believe in the cycle of life and rebirth, then when you die is merely a waystation…fascinating…
Here's something that you will find of interest. How men steal the earnings of their wives. Despite the fact that it's religiously not mandated. There are two philosophical questions here.
One, how can you ensure proper division of rights? Between man and woman, husband and wife. And what needs to be done from a legal perspective. Is that law from the sharia law? Or shall you do this from the perspective of universal law like the convention of rights of women or United Nations universal declaration of human rights.
Second is what is religion? What has been written down or what is practised? Take this example in this situation. Islam in the majority version clearly says they the monies due to the wife are her's. But the way Islam is practised in Bangladesh is different. Then the question is, who determines who is right? Acres and tomes have been written on pretty much every topic under the sun and there's no consistency.
For both questions, it's vital to remove religion from the public sphere. Absolutely vital son. Because most if not all religions are a way of controlling the populace and more importantly are skewed towards male patriarchy. It's one when you kick out morons of the religious orders that true civilisation exists.
But it will be a long haul. Specially with these abhrahamic religions. Christianity has been controlled by and large. Judaism is still having challenges in Israel and well you know what's happening with Islam across the world. Both your and my generation will struggle with this religious genie son. It has to be forced into the bottle and capped hard. Long fight.
A review of Appropriation of Wives’ Income: a New Form of Dowry in Bangladesh, by Farah Deeba Chowdhury.
Farah Deeba Chowdhury’s dissertation investigates the interrelationship between law, culture, patriarchy, and Islam in the context of contemporary Bangladesh. The dissertation has nine chapters.
Chowdhury has concentrated on the situation of Muslim married women in her dissertation. In the introduction, she argues that many practices in Bangladeshi society are based on misinterpretation of Islam and the main purpose of such manipulation is to seek control over wives’ income, financial resources and other assets. The author characterizes such practice as “appropriation of wives’ income as a new form of dowry” (p. 1). As the dowry system has been legally banned in Bangladesh, the income of working women is now considered as a source of earning for their husbands. The author argues that the root of such practice lies in the norms of patriarchal society. Women are deprived as the patriarchal society never conveys their role to the broader society. Instead, the dominant fallacy is women are only obliged to perform duties towards their in-law’s family.
This was a fascinating article even if it left me a bit befuddled. What was the hypothesis and how did they manage to come to their conclusions? I quote the synopsis.
The issue of women's empowerment has a long history. This article intends to trace the issue of women's empowerment in the area that now forms contemporary Bangladesh. In this regard, we have delved into the early part of the twentieth century to look into women's writing in numerous journals that were beginning to be published in that era. Looking into Muslim-edited journals, we look into how issues of women's education, writing and the place of women in society were being debated. In this process, we have laid special emphasis on women's writing, using the examples that we have cited as part of a new form of women's voices. What we discover about women's empowerment in this process is that it is a fraught issue, and there is no clear-cut or direct path that can be easily delineated. Early twentieth-century anti-colonial nation-making processes were indeed complex, and in the Bengal region, veered between emphasizing a Bengali as well as a Muslim identity. It is interesting to see how issues of language and the position of women coalesce to form a very exciting arena for researchers.Concentrating on literary writings by women in the early part of the twentieth century, this research is an effort to look into the construction of the modern Bengali Muslim woman, and the connections that can be drawn between the formation of this identity and the emergence of a notion of a Bengali nation. In broad outline, we will be debating the main contours of this nation — based as it is on religious, community and linguistic affiliations. Identity — both at the individual, or community/national level, remained, and remains fluid, as its various dimensions are foregrounded at different times. The nation is also being envisaged as an appendage to modernity, hence the lines that defined modernity at this point are also shifting, and the grounds that the envisaged modern nation occupies are continuously reformed and reconstituted.
foregrounded? eh?
But very interesting to learn about Bengali women writers at the beginning of the last century. Fascinating flowering of their own identity. The authors also navigate and bring out fascinating differences between the urban and rural, muslim and hindu, urdu and bengali speaking and the mixtures thereof.
An interesting paper but curiously left me unsatisfied. I would have liked the authors to have delved deeper into the mix and seen how the Bengali woman emerged, comparing the Hindu and Muslim woman, rather than taking a uni-dimensional perspective because I do believe that there would be a firmer and broader identity with the Bengali bit rather than the religious bit. Still some good references…
the world's law codes are full of stupidities and idiocies. Mostly arising from the religious underpinning of most modern law systems. But thankfully most modern law systems have removed crap like this. But when people say laws are religiously mandated is when all kinds of alarm bells go off.
Stoning still happens today. There are 15 countries in which stoning is either practiced or authorized by law, even if it has never been practiced. In Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria (in one-third of the country's states), Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, stoning is a legal punishment. However, out of these countries, only in Iran, Pakistan and Somalia have stonings actually occurred, and all instances in Pakistan have occurred outside the legal system.
By comparison, three of the remaining five countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Mali) do not condone stoning in national legislation, but sentences and executions have been carried out by non-state actors. In the Aceh region of Indonesia and Malaysia, stoning is sanctioned regionally but banned nationally.
This news story is just erm bordering on the off the wtfness scale so many times like its a demented bottle fly banging its head against a window.
I quote the last bit which also completely bewildered me.
Possibly the most interesting thing about both of these websites is that they feature bundle offers—at hymenshop.com, you can get five artificial hymens for $114.95; athymenshop.net, you can get five of them for $103. I’m honestly trying to envision the situation that would call for five artificial hymens—I haven’t had any success yet. It could be a good device in a grim yet devastatingly entertaining farce by Pedro Almodóvar.
Curious, whilst I had heard that there is a clear and statistically significant difference in women versus men voters, I never really delved deeper into it. This paper gave some interesting learning points for me
in developing countries women tend to exhibit less support for democracy than men
the two sexes behave differently in politics, as they vote differently and do not implement the same policies
The evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa indicates that, on average, 73 percent of men believe that democracy is preferable to any other kind of government, while only 65 percent of women agree with this statement
It is well established that men and women vote differently, with women tending to support more left-wing parties;
Three reasons have been put forward as explanations of gender differences in preferences for parties and policies: women’s greater risk aversion and the consequent desire for insurance; women’s lower incomes or expected incomes, for example following a prospective divorce, leading to support for redistribution; and a preference for social expenditures such as basic infrastructure (e.g. water supplies), health and education that impact the production of household goods, including children, on which women tend to specialize;
Evidence for India shows that the type of public goods provided depends strongly on the gender of the local political leader, with female leaders investing more in goods linked to their own concerns, such as drinking water, and spending more in public health provision
the work on corruption and gender has highlighted that females are less likely to be involved in corruption and in bribes and that increasing the share of females in the political arena and, more generally, social equality between men and women reduces the degree of corruption
in countries with a sufficiently high level of the Human Development Index and political rights there is no significant difference in the replies of the two sexes. Such evidence implies that the observed gender gap in democratic support does not capture intrinsic differences in the preferences of men and women but rather that it is highly dependent on the economic and institutional climate in which women live
An alternative hypothesis is that women’s lower support for democracy comes from the fact that democratic transitions are often associated with civil conflict. If women have a higher cost of conflict than men, then they are less likely to support democracy. Our analysis seems to point in this direction. When asked whether the country’s leader should be chosen through open elections, women respond yes as often as men. However, they are less likely to support party plurality and limits on re-election. It is possible that these two aspects are seen by women as sources of potential conflict and hence as the ’down side of democracy’, which would explain their replies to the broader question of whether they think democracy is the best possible regime
Very interesting results indeed. Not much to say other than transitions can really be challenging but it takes a long time for women to recover from transitions like this….something that can actually make their lives better – democracy – has lower support because of high transition costs..
Sad statement, India, the country with the greatest physical labour requirements, exhibits the largest labour market gender inequality.
The author asks a good question.
Since WWII, women in the United States have greatly benefited from job requirements shifting away from physical attributes (“brain”) toward their comparative advantage in intellectual attributes (“brawn”) (seeRendall, 2010). While some of the shifting demand favoring women is related to job requirements changing intra-occupation, a large portion of the decrease in physical requirements is due to a structural shift toward services (Rendall, 2011). Hence, the last 60-years have seen an explosion in job opportunities for women in the United States, coupled with higher wages and relatively large returns to education. Can this structural transformation mechanism provide some insight into gender inequality in developing countries?
So how did they work out?
All the 4 countries, Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and India were ranked on their changes between brawn and brain. India, typically, didnt shift the brain demand upwards.
Given factor requirements, , and estimates of “prices,” , the decomposition of individual traits and factor effects on wage changes is given by,
(2)
where ω is the average (natural) log of wages, and bars without time subscripts denote averages over time, e.g., .
Thus, the wage gap from period 0 to t is decomposed into four categories:
1.
Relative changes in standard male and standard female characteristics, given average returns across time.
2.
Relative price changes, given average male and female standard characteristics (including changes in general gender discrimination λ).
3.
Relative changes in skill endowments, given average skill prices.
4.
Relative skill price changes, given average male and female skills.
I am not sure about the usage of average returns across time, that can actually hide quite a lot of rather interesting movements. Perhaps median returns would have been more accurate. Same with the average skill prices. There have been quite a lot of fertility changes as well so that impact needs to be considered.
The policy implications are good enough to be quoted in full
The wage analysis of Section 4 strongly suggests that falling brawn requirements and rising brain requirements can have a large impact on women’s relative wages. Section 5 provides evidence for policies related to improving the labor supply of women.
More specifically, Brazil is a clear example of rising brain requirements and falling brawn requirements significantly closing the gender wage gap. In contrast, India is a striking counterexample, where women work primarily in the highly brawn dependent agricultural sector. Thailand is a good example of a country that experienced major structural transformation within the labor market. This has allowed Thai women greater labor market flexibility and better opportunities to match innate abilities with skill requirements. While some of the gains in Mexico were undone by the rise of maquiladoras (low-brain jobs) in the 1990s, it could be argued that, as countries move along the development path and become richer, gender equality should naturally follow. However, at the same time, policy makers should promote an open environment with respect to education and employment opportunities for both genders. In particular, improving the quality of education will likely help strengthen and develop women’s comparative advantage in brain endowments. This policy recommendation is supported by findings in Pitt et al. (2010) for Bangladesh and Klasen and Pieters (2012)for India.
Mexico also provides a cautionary tale, as suggested by Gonzalez (2001). Mexico pursued manufacturing sector growth in the 1990s. This lead to diminishing returns to brain endowments, and was considered counterproductive when accounting for the effects on female employment opportunities. Thus, if improving gender equality is a goal, policy makers should encourage the development of service sector employment. Specific policies aimed at attracting firms or FDI in the knowledge industry would seem most beneficial in generating greater gender equality in terms of wages. India has started moving along this path relatively recently with its information technology focus (see Winters & Yusuf, 2007), and the results of this paper suggest this is a good first-step.
Note however, that policies just aimed at increasing the knowledge industry might not be enough to persuade women to participate in the labor market. Section 5 provides clear evidence in this regard. Specifically, fostering a good environment for high-quality education is extremely important. However, as can be seen from the predicted gender employment ratios in all countries, higher brain demands still favor men. This means that equal access to education is imperative for the strengthening of female employment opportunities.
In conclusion, a policy aimed at attracting firms to create employment in the service sector (knowledge industries) with good access to education for both men and women should result in greater gender equality in terms of labor market outcomes
net net, educate women, more and more and more….and reduce their fertility impact..
Using a unique dataset that I collected in three villages in semi-arid India, I analyze the role of perceived returns to education and social norms regarding the ideal age of marriage in the educational plans, i.e., aspirations, parents have for their children. I show that perceptions of the ideal age of marriage significantly constrain the education that parents aspire to have for their daughters, but not their sons. Furthermore, aspirations are sensitive to the perceived returns to higher education in the case of boys, but not in the case of girls.
Bit of a commonsense and traditional view confirmation. Regretfully, Indians are still thinking of their daughters in a very patriarchal manner..and treat sons differently. The author reviewed three villages in AP, Deccan and Vidharba. “Only 39% of the girls would be allowed (by their parents) to pursue higher education, compared to 71% of the boys, and only 8% of the girls is expected to complete higher education versus 22% of the boys.” now that’s pretty shocking…the differences are amazing, orders of magnitude. Interestingly, the author states that if only we can change the socially acceptable age of marriage (18 for girls and 22 for sons) by 1 year will increase education by 0.7 years! So there could potentially be a case for moving the age of marriage up? either by social pressure or by education and perhaps even by law.
Some bright spots still occur, the parents are clearly able to appreciate that higher education will lead to higher returns. on the other hand, despite the clear increase in returns due to education for girls, the costs of having an unmarried girl in the house post the socially acceptable age of marriage is too high and more than the return.
So the increased urbanisation of Indian society should also help in improving the rights and prospects of girls, if they dont get raped and abused in the cities…Pox on them.
More I read about the educational system here in the UK, the more I worry. Why is being clever and intelligent considered to be bad? I quote from this story about why girls don't take up Physics.
For the past two decades, female students have accounted for only one-fifth of those taking the subject at A-level. It is the fourth most popular subject for boys, yet slips to 19th in the rankings for girls. According to a recent study by the Institute of Physics, using information provided by the National Pupil Database, 49% of state co-educational schools in England did not send any girls to study physics at A-level in 2011. By contrast, girls were almost two and a half times more likely to take the subject at A-level if they were at a single-sex school – a finding that suggests there might be an ingrained cultural perception in co-educational establishments that physics is somehow "not for girls".
This is sad indeed. The problem is those little shits (boys!)
So what are the girls saying?
"It's not cool to be clever at the moment, especially as a girl," adds Williams. "Boys don't mind being thought of as geeks, but girls do. I do English lit as well, and I'm the only one in the class who also takes physics. Everyone in the class was kind of like, 'You do physics?'" She curls her lip in disgust. "But we're good because we've got a whole group of friends [doing physics as well]."
These school kids are stupid, seriously stupid. Who will be earning more and having more fun? the idiots or the smarts? Why would you not look up to the smarts?
So what can one do?
The importance of a supportive network of friends taking the same subject is key. But it is also, as Alice points out, a question of seeing more positive role models on television and in schools. Although there are prominent male presenters in popular science – Brian Cox,David Attenborough – there are hardly any female counterparts. And when female scientists do make it on to the pages of newspapers, or into television studios, the way they are presented can be extremely patronising. A 2010 paper by academics at the University of Cardiff examined 51 interviews with scientists, eight of whom were women, pulled from a sample of 12 UK national papers in 2006. Half of the profiles of the women referred to their clothing, physique or hairstyle, compared with 21% of the profiles of men. The male scientists interviewed were often used to signal gravitas, while women were more likely to be said to make science "accessible" or "sexy".
<sighs> here we go again…But the article ends with a spot of brightness
And yet there are signs that the culture is changing. It's not just the clever young women I meet at Lampton who signal the dissolution of previously entrenched ideas, but also those physicists currently working in postgraduate fields. Aki Matsushima, a 26-year-old studying for a PhD in quantum physics at Imperial College, London, insists that the lifestyle of a research scientist "is very flexible and actually accommodating, and in that respect it can be really good for women who have other responsibilities, like childcare. There's been a lot of encouragement and funding to get more women in, and once you're in there's no discrimination. In fact, there's lots of encouragement."
However, Matsushima acknowledges that the lack of female professors is a problem. She, like Donald, attended an all-girl school and then chose to attend a single-sex college at Cambridge. "I knew the course was going to be all men," she explains, "so I applied to a women's college so I could hang out with girls as well." But once Matsushima had made it into the male-dominated world of physics, she found it was – and continues to be – an extremely fair environment, with no gender discrimination.
"Maybe at lunchtime you're hanging out with a load of guys talking about computer games, but that's about it," she says. This year, Matsushima was a finalist in the BBC's Masterchef and came into contact with some professional chefs who told her she would have to work "twice as hard" to make it as a woman. "In cooking, there is a kind of discrimination internally," she says. "That hasn't happened to me in physics."
We need more of this, more women stepping up and the organisations being gender neutral. It is not easy. Over the past 10 odd years, ever since I got into a situation that I would be hiring, I have encouraged the recruitment agencies and HR folks to send more women into the mix. It has been a struggle. For the front office roles, for the sales roles, there is a dearth of good women but it is getting better. For example, right now, my team has a balanced gender ratio, and believe you me, it took a shed load of effort. The pressure to pick the first half way decent candidate (who usually is male) is huge due to business pressures. So to delay hiring, to reach out into the women networks, to insist that for every 2 male cv’s I get, I need a female cv. It slows down the process hugely…
The case of the Indian woman gang raped and who subsequently died from her injuries is pretty gruesome. The onus obviously fell on the police, who basically took corrupt payments to allow these buses to ply. And the dismal rate of convictions (600 cases and 1 conviction). So what do the police themself say? Here are two contradictory views. First:
Reviled as an ineffective, uncouth force that terrorizes people rather than protect them, Delhi Police officials find scarce favour with Delhiites. Indrani Basu of TOI spoke to a lower functionary of the force to unveil a lesser-known side of the daily functioning of the 76,000-strong team that is supposed to keep the city safe.
When I joined the police force, I didn't know I would spend most of my time doing things other than what I was trained for. The public expects police to help them with every problem, including matters unrelated to our work.
The control room receives roughly 24,000 calls a day; 70% of these are not policing matters. Almost daily we are called in for civic disputes, problems with electric supply, presence of stray dogs, monkeys - the list is endless.
Civic agencies should handle such complaints but people call the police as other control rooms don't spring into action. We have to resolve the issue as it may become a law and order problem. There have been occasions where we've fetched electricians or other technicians to resolve some issue.
The public perceives us as unruly and uncouth. Much of this has to do with our working conditions. Unlike other government departments, all of which have fixed work-hours, cops don't have any shift system.
I may have a 12-hour duty but if I get a distress call 30 minutes before I'm to leave, I must attend to the call. This can take hours - many times the next 12 hours - to sort out. It's usual to work 24 hours without rest and continue the next day. The Delhi Police Act says an officer is on duty round the clock. A policeman gets a month's extra salary every year to compensate for working without a shift system, but this compromises quality of work.
Many times we don't get vehicles to respond to distress calls. We usually use private conveyance to reach the crime spot: our own or an auto. There are around 15-20 cops per police station. But not more than four or five motorcycles are provided to each. Most bikes are on patrolling duty.
Some stations have an emergency response vehicle. The conveyance allowance up to an Inspector's rank is about Rs 375 a month. This cripples our work. There is need for a proper emergency response unit for every call received; not leave an officer to his own devices.
Investigations throw up their own kind of miscellaneous expenses that you will never see in official statistics. From getting a post-mortem done to collecting forensic reports, our pocket is made lighter in many ways. We have to submit a charge-sheet within 90 days, but with limited forensic facilities we invariably incur expenses to get test results on time.
Provisions exist to claim investigation expenditure, but it's a tedious process. Also, there are no proper bills for most such expenses. For example, every year we remove several dead bodies. We make our own arrangements to retrieve the body and take it to the mortuary. Usually, we rope in a passerby willing to do the job in return for payment that comes from our own pocket. How can we claim such expenses?
We don't even have basic facilities. No buildings or land are demarcated for police stations when an area is developed. Outposts come up based on need. Many times such outposts are mere tents. It doesn't feel like we work for a serious organization.
Several stations don't have facilities for overnight stay though duty can stretch to three, four days continuously. Issues of mosquitoes, unhygienic surroundings and unavailability of fans plague many. Some police stations don't even have access to drinking water. There may be no water connection even. Lack of proper facilities causes us to function with a negative frame of mind.
Such tough work conditions make us an unhappy lot, which sometimes compromises the police-public interface. Many cope with the pressure by resorting to corruption, anger, brutality - a vicious cycle.
We constantly deal with criminals with no stress-relieving facilities provided. Many cops need psychological counselling, therapy to deal with their daily stress. No such facility is available. Some medical camps have raised these concerns but they are never resolved.
Feel pity for them? Here’s another interview with a copper. The chap also calls the rapists as bastards, as I did, and got into trouble for saying that. But leaving that aside for the moment, the opinions are pretty Neanderthal. Now check what they said about women.
I realised that according to stringent criteria of the Delhi Police, almost all women deserve to be raped. And here’s why:
Who are these people, I'd wonder, who genuinely believe that a woman would deliberately provoke sexual assault. Reuters
One, she is not in a salwar kameez or sari, at all times
Most urban professional women wear a lot of skirts, jeans, blouses, and dresses. And they usually carefully calibrate what they wear according to where they will be: out on the street or at an upmarket bar/restaurant. But all this effort is pointless because as Satbir Singh, Additional SHO of Sector 31 Police Station, Faridabad, puts it: “Ladkiya jo hai unko yahan tak yahan tak (he gestures to mean that women should cover their entire body, then carries on speaking)… Skirt pehenti hai. Blouse dalti hai; poora nahi dalti hai. Dupatta nahi dalti. Apne aapko dikhawa karti hai. Baccha uske taraf akarshit hota hai.” (Girls should be covered from here to here… They wear skirts, blouses, that don’t cover them fully. Don’t wear a dupatta. They display themselves. A kid will naturally be attracted to her.)
Sub-Inspector Arjun Singh, SHO of Surajpur Police Station, Greater Noida, clarifies the position further: “She is dressed in a manner that people get attracted to her. In fact, she wants them to do something to her.”
In other words, unless a woman is fully covered from head to toe – at all times – shewants men to rape her.
Two, if a woman is in a sexual relationship with one man, then she deserves to be raped by him and all his friends. Dharamveer Singh, Additional SHO at Indirapuram Police Station in Ghaziabad, tells Tehelka: “It’s very rare that a girl is forcefully picked up by 10 boys. A girl who gets into a car with boys is never innocent. If she does, she definitely has a relationship with at least one of them.”
Three, she keeps the company of drunk men. Is it bad judgement to drink with strangers in India? Yes. And many of us are far too cautious to slam back the vodka unless we are amongst good friends. But who cares since our men in uniform seem to think that alcohol and opportunity is sufficient – and just – cause for rape:
Roop Lal of Sector 40, Gurgaon, sought to find a rationale to the occurrence of gang-rape: “Jaise hum log baithe hai, zyaada daaru pee li. Chalte peeli. Behnchodh, phekh saala, phir to aise hi hoga. Raat bhar rakh li. Uska jawab kya degi wo apne gharwalon ko, ki jo ek ghante ke liye keh kar gayi hai, aur poori night main kahan gayi thi. To maa-baap to poochenge, bhai bhi poochega. Jinka samaaj hai woh to poochte hai (Say we are sitting and had one drink too many while on the move… it’s obvious that it’ll happen. Keep her for the entire night. What will she tell her parents? She was supposed to be away for an hour and has ended up being out the entire night. Parents will question, so will her brother. Society will ask questions.”)
So when a man drinks, he turns into a sex-crazed animal ready to rape the nearest woman. When a woman drinks, she is a slut looking to be raped. Ergo, women should not drink, nor should she place herself anywhere in the vicinity of men who do. (A rule that includes being in a bar late at night) And even if one of the men happens to be your boyfriend, it is no cause to let your guard down because: See reason #2.
Four, a girl deserves to be raped because her mother is a “slut.” When all else fails, blame the mom. That seems to be the reasoning of the investigating officer in the Noida gang rape case which involved a Class X student. Here’s Ram Malik’s justification for the rape of a minor: “The girl’s mother is divorced. She’s living with another man from the Yadav community. She’s 48 whereas the man is 28. It’s inevitable the two daughters will be wayward, isn’t it?”
Five, a woman deserves to be raped because she belongs to the upper class – or the lower class. Upper class women don’t know how to behave or dress modestly, which invites trouble. They are also either high class hookers, or alcohol and drug-addicted floozies. Their lower class peers, however, are just looking to make a quick buck.
In fact, according to 17 of the 30 policemen interviewed by Tehelka that “real” rape cases are rare: “There are cases but 70 percent involve consensual sex. Only if someone sees, or the money is denied, it gets turned into rape”
Sub-Inspector Manoj Rawat of Noida’s Sector 24 Police Station is far more skeptical: “Everything in NCR happens with mutual understanding. My personal view is that there are one or two percent rape cases in NCR.”
And six, a woman deserves to be raped because she reported the rape. The most astounding revelation in the Tehelka expose is this: most rape complaints are false, motivated by either vindictiveness or monetary gain. It’s an excellent example of circular logic:
Tehelka asked Yogender Singh Tomar, Additional SHO, Sector 39, Noida, if it was easy for a rape victim to approach the police. His answer left us shocked: “Aasaan nahi hota uske liye. Bezzati se sabhi darti hai. Akhbaar baazi se bhi darti hai. Asliyat main wahin aati hai jo dhande main lipt hoti hai (It’s never easy for the victim. Everyone is scared of humiliation. Everyone’s wary of media and society. In reality, the ones who complain are only those who have turned rape into a business).”
In other words, if you’re “really” raped, you would never complain. If you complain, you were not “really” raped.
So here’s the bottomline, ladies and gentleman. If we were to apply the this insane litmus test to all the women we know – friends, family members, distant relatives, colleagues, maids, or acquaintances – none of us would make the grade. According to the Delhi police, we all deserve to be raped.
Before one gets up and going, one has to see that pretty much the same views were uttered by the politicians, they are uttered by the various religious bastards of the sri ram sene ilk from the Hindu right to the Muslim muppets who prefer to shove their women in burqa’s and marry them off to the rich shiekhs by giving them a religious justification for prostitution. Same sermons one gets from pretty much across the society. Try to walk in any Indian city with you wearing a skirt, the stares you get are amazing..its just ludicrous. And yes, I have done so, went across an entire town wearing a ghagra choli on a bet.
We frequently have “bring your daughter to work” day, a way to encourage more women participation in the banking industry, but when I saw this Dalit man’s photograph with his baby daughter, it took me aback.
His name is Babloo (my namesake as it happens) and he lives in Bharatpur, a small town in India. His wife died during childbirth but to keep body and soul together, he makes a living driving a rickshaw.
Check this article out. What I didnt realise was this assertion
The old -- and repeatedly discredited -- game of citing women's incomes as some percentage of men's incomes is being played once again, as part of the "war on women" theme.
Since women average fewer hours of work per year, and fewer years of consecutive full-time employment than men, among other differences, comparisons of male and female annual earnings are comparisons of apples and oranges, as various female economists have pointed out. Read Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute or Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, for example.
When you compare women and men in the same occupations with the same skills, education, hours of work, and many other factors that go into determining pay, the differences in incomes shrink to the vanishing point -- and, in some cases, the women earn more than comparable men.
Now this came as a surprise to me, I always thought that women were being paid much lower compared to men, but to hear that once you control for these other factors, there is no difference.
Hmmm. I wonder if this will raise the proverbial shit storm or will simply be ignored when inconvenient facts emerge?
![tumblr_mg9u3rPNKJ1rmjxl5o1_500[1]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpCggQkq6idnz3XiJp6kFG92nPFeIzeW9lWp3MKTPL1e6F8FQKAbHrsyF7WIDvld07E5SUfCAGdO7ttm5bd2vMLgi74M-olgR6Xc0LT5xbhpr6wGEAy2ELVaZr9D4Ckl2ym-0Qji-jMrg/s1600-h/tumblr_mg9u3rPNKJ1rmjxl5o1_50013.jpg "tumblr_mg9u3rPNKJ1rmjxl5o1_500[1]")
![artificialhymenadvert[1]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB_Vdy7WeqerXcm6TieX2RKOUP4urlWn_gxajYPL0a4UZbU4jaohoWPND_Qj8FPga0JZg0pTmNjCxUhY818y2UiN3L-qVWtZ5vF8cQbD2uCjzbsRspjTSsz84bqO1eafeRn4AMcSoES7w/s1600-h/artificialhymenadvert13.jpg "artificialhymenadvert[1]")
![1-s2.0-S0305750X12002495-gr1[1]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUfEBuKNeLl13Z0T9Nw2pSY_b0GofJCzufWK5ZLgzBVTN5vPHHjUB_bw-LbTUavvHJIxop-ufnXK01aBx7dIz515T9-vpCcwk-xoqebupXLLqs-cy4BHTSDvBgE3kQgXlX1ol-ul5ARcU/s1600-h/1s2.0S0305750X12002495gr11.png "1-s2.0-S0305750X12002495-gr1[1]")
![1-s2.0-S0305750X12002495-gr2[1]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy6Le6rY26_h2UywqiqwDjExKmlir3GdyaWSGrr_Hh4JBThF2J8DWqCZv2d5JDAkfZ9t0taTRJqlOxfedhrV7iPMgHdavgBg97vaHQt8yi7jvVbFGq0758TaZRHOy3CUE7ByoyeRb458E/s1600-h/1s2.0S0305750X12002495gr21.png "1-s2.0-S0305750X12002495-gr2[1]")
, and estimates of “prices,” 
, the decomposition of individual traits and factor effects on wage changes is given by, 
. 
