From the NYT: Women have made huge strides in the job market since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963. Yet almost half a century after it became illegal to pay women less than men for the same job, the weekly wage of a typical woman who works full time is almost 18 percent less than that of the typical working man. 

That wage gap is drawing renewed attention as President Obama courts women’s votes ahead of the November election. Last week Republicans in the Senate blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill supported by the administration that would have limited the reasons employers can use to justify paying a man more than a woman for doing a similar job. 

The attention is welcome. The pay deficit for women has narrowed remarkably since the 1960s. But progress closing the gap has slowed over the last 20 years or so. And the flow of women into the work force has stalled after five decades of breakneck growth. Some economists worry that women’s progress in the job market might be hitting a wall.  Continue here.

From the NYT: Can the word “gay” still be used as an insult? 

Not according to an appellate court in Albany, which last week issued a ruling that in its judicial effect stripped the word “gay” of any derogatory connotation. It is now no longer considered slanderous in the State of New York to falsely call someone gay. Gay has, in the eyes of the court, as it has in the minds of sane people, lost currency as an accusation. Say I chose to live my life as a telenovela and decided to break up my best friend’s wedding by announcing in a rehearsal dinner toast that her husband was gay. That husband would now have as little ground for a lawsuit against me as if I had described him as blond, pigeon-toed, happy or merely mediocre at Texas Hold ’Em.

In arriving at its decision, the court erased decades of rulings that treated inaccurate descriptions of sexual orientation as defamation. “These appellate division decisions are inconsistent with current public policy and should no longer be followed,” the unanimous decision, written by Justice Thomas Mercure, stated.

What took so long?  Continue.

From the Atlantic: Though it’s hardly shocking or novel that men are overrepresented in media and punditry, it’s horrifying how true that is even for issues that primarily concern women, as this graph shows (larger version here). On abortion, eight out of every 10 commentators are male. It’s only slightly better for birth control. 4th Estate, the media-tracking project that produced this graphic, says “women’s rights” is the issue with the most parity, but men are still a slight majority there, too (4th Estate says the category involves any story not directly or specifically related to the other three — so, for example, the hubbub after Rush Limbaugh called activists Sandra Fluke a “slut”).

Nor does the problem seem to have any boundaries of medium or politics. The three big prestige papers have nearly identical ratios of men to women, with males making up two-thirds of those quoted on women’s issues. USA Today is even worse. News Corporation, with its conservative leaning Fox News and Fox Business channels, is slightly more male-dominated than other major media companies. But left-leaning MSNBC’s Hardball has fewer women than Fox News’ Special Report, while centrist CNN’s State of the Union, though hosted by Candy Crowley, is so bad it could practically pass for the clubhouse at Augusta National.  Full article here.

From the Washington Post: DC Comics announced on Friday that Green Lantern, a superhero staple for decades, is gay. (And all of this time, my money was on Wonder Woman or Aquaman.) When bigotry falls, it often falls fast — gay marriage, Barack Obama as the first gay president and now popular superheroes like Green Lantern.

Green Lantern is the name of multiple superheroes who possess a green power ring. Over the past 70 years, there have been several Green Lanterns with various names. The original Green Lantern was Alan Scott who was introduced during World War II. The best-known Green Lantern is Hal Jordan, who was portrayed by Ryan Reynolds in the 2011 movie. Jordan emerged in the late 1950s after DC Comics stopped publishing the original series about Scott.

To be clear, because it matters to comic geeks, it’s Scott, not Jordan, a founding member of the Justice League, who is gay. In previous incarnations, Scott had a gay son. But in the new comic series, Green Lantern is young again, without children, and his past has been entirely rebooted.  Full article here.

Kiana Hayeri grew up in Tehran, where the country’s morality police restricted her public behavior. She left in 2005 when she was 17 and moved to Toronto, where she studied photography at Ryerson University.

Ms. Hayeri returned to Iran in 2010 to explore the dual lives of many young women who are expected to behave and dress modestly in public by covering their hair, arms and legs. But behind closed doors, these women act very much like Ms. Hayeri’s Canadian friends — dating, singing, studying ballet and even swimming.

“Everything that is banned by the government is being practiced, but behind closed doors,” said Ms. Hayeri, 24. “I think that my generation is exposed to the West through satellite and Internet so much that they don’t let the restrictions stop them.”

The young women she has photographed come from mostly middle- and upper-middle class religious families, though many of them are not religious themselves. Some of their parents were either relatively lenient or they found a way to dress conservatively when they left home but changed their clothing afterward.

Ms. Hayeri does not claim that her project represents the entirety of Iran. But she said there are many young people in the big cities who yearn for a less constricting public life.  More from the NYT.

As it has grown increasingly difficult to find a steady full-time job with benefits, more men are reaching for a chance at the American dream in female-dominated occupations.  Read the full story here.

Wearing brick-red scrubs and chatting in Spanish, Miguel Alquicira settled a tiny girl into an adult-size dental chair and soothed her through a set of X-rays. Then he ushered the dentist, a woman, into the room and stayed on to serve as interpreter.

A male dental assistant, Mr. Alquicira is in the minority. But he is also part of a distinctive, if little noticed, shift in workplace gender patterns. Over the last decade, men have begun flocking to fields long the province of women.

Mr. Alquicira, 21, graduated from high school in a desolate job market, one in which the traditional opportunities, like construction and manufacturing, for young men without a college degree had dried up. After career counselors told him that medical fields were growing, he borrowed money for an eight-month training course. Since then, he has had no trouble finding jobs that pay $12 or $13 an hour.

From the NYT Magazine comes this feature on midwives.  Ina May Gaskin, the original home-birth evangelist, is finally winning converts in the mainstream.

Gaskin, a longtime critic of American maternity care, is perhaps the most prominent figure in the crusade to expand access to, and to legalize, midwife-assisted homebirth. Although she practices without a medical license, she is invited to speak at major teaching hospitals and conferences around the world and has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Thames Valley University in England. She is the only midwife to have an obstetric procedure named for her. The Gaskin Maneuver is used for shoulder dystocia, when a baby’s head is born but her shoulders are stuck in the birth canal.

 Kathryn wanted pants. And short hair. Then trucks and swords.

Her parents, Jean and Stephen, were fine with their toddler’s embrace of all things boy. They’ve both been school teachers and coaches in Maryland and are pretty immune to the quirky stuff that kids do.

Kathryn didn’t even want to be around other little girls, let alone acknowledge that she biologically is one.

Jean tried to put her daughter’s behavior to rest. She sat down with a toddler-version of an anatomy book and showed Kathryn, by then 3, the cartoonish drawings of a naked boy and girl.

“See? You’re a girl. You have girl parts,” Jean told her big-eyed daughter. “You’ve always been a girl.”

Kathryn looked up at her mom, incomprehension clouding her round face.

“When did you change me?” the child asked. 

Was something wrong with Kathryn?

Her little girl’s brain was different. Jean could tell. She had heard about transgender people, those who are one gender physically but the other gender mentally. Who hadn’t caught the transgendered Chaz Bono drama on “Dancing With the Stars”?

“But this young? In kids?” Jean wondered. She had grown up in a traditional family in the Midwest, with a mother who’d gone to medical school after having children. Jean considered herself open-minded, but this was clearly outside her realm of experience.

She went online to see if a book about transgender kids even existed. It did — “The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals.” Its summary read: “What do you do when your toddler daughter’s first sentence is that she’s a boy? What will happen when your preschool son insists on wearing a dress to school? Is this ever just a phase? How can you explain this to your neighbors and family?” 

Continue with pictures and video at the Post.

A further update on this series about transgender children may be found here.

Yankee Candle Company has decided to follow the fragrance industry’s formula for marketing to men: Change the packaging color and name of your product, say it’s Manly and boom! — dude customers galore. At least that seems to be what they hope will happen with their new line of “Man Candles” (yes that is the official name).  Here’s the link to the Huffington Post.

How the ‘war on women’ quashed feminist stereotypes

When Phyllis Schlafly is forced to concede that not all feminists are ugly, it’s clear that something has gone awry on the right. Sure enough, in April, Schlafly, a conservative crusader who has been peddling stereotypes of women’s activists as physically and socially unappealing for decades, thought she should warn cadets at the Citadel not to fall for one. “Some of them are pretty,” she said. “They don’t all look like Bella Abzug.”

Schlafly’s anachronistic dig at Abzug, a boisterous New York congresswoman who has been dead for 14 years and whose name and fondness for large hats probably don’t ring alarm bells for many undergrads, betrays the anxiety undergirding her warning. The aged, arid vision of feminism on which conservatives have long relied (and that Abzug embodied only in caricature, never in reality) is finally losing its power.

More from the Washington Post here: http://wapo.st/KuJvnW