Free Republic

Women were notably victimized by lockdowns, masking, and vaccine mandates. The lockdowns yanked many working women with children out of the workforce, closed child care and schooling, and forced them back into the home. Millions were hit by this fate, and many are still not back at work. Labor force participation by working-age women is back where it was decades ago. That is to say, many women who lost paid work have not gone back to work. I’ve yet to see any major feminist influencer comment on this disaster much less speak frankly about what has happened, namely the reversal...

Four female former employees of Alphabet Inc.’s Google won class-action status to pursue their gender-pay disparity lawsuit against the tech giant on behalf of almost 11,000 other women. A state judge in San Francisco certified the class action Thursday, allowing the lead plaintiffs to represent 10,800 women over claims that Google pays men more for doing the same job. A previously disclosed analysis showed that the case seeks more than $600 million in damages. The women allege violations of California’s Equal Pay Act, one of the strongest measures of its kind nationwide. “This is a significant day for women at...

Google said Thursday it was tweaking its translation application with the goal of reducing gender bias. The move comes amid criticism that Google Translate often defaulted to masculine names when it converted text to another language. […] Up to now, the translate program provided only one translation for a query, often choosing the masculine word for terms like “doctor,” and the feminine word for “nurse,” for example. “Now you’ll get both a feminine and masculine translation for a single word — like ‘surgeon’ — when translating from English into French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish,” [product manager James Kuczmarski] said. …

Babies are so passe, even royal ones. The hip new thing to have is a "theyby", according to a trend spotted by New York magazine that sees parents bringing up their offspring in a gender-neutral fashion.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Wednesday that the Justice Department has awarded a total of nine grants worth $9.4 million to national and local groups to implement “the department’s Guidance on Identifying and Preventing Gender Bias in Law Enforcement Response to Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence.” […] According to the DOJ’s guidance, “Gender bias, whether explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, may include police officers misclassifying or underreporting sexual assault or domestic violence cases, or inappropriately concluding that sexual assault cases are unfounded; failing to test sexual assault kits; interrogating rather than interviewing victims and witnesses; treating domestic violence...

Harriet Beecher Stowe, European gardens and gender bias were discussed in a recent Modern Language Association (MLA) panel at their annual convention held this year in Austin, Texas. The panel was entitled, "Bootstrapping Broads: On the Work of Writing Labor." Gretchen Murphy, a professor of English at the University of Texas-Austin, spoke at length about Harriet Beecher Stowe and her experience in 19th Century England. She saw Stowe as "a female celebrity" in her time, but restricted in what she could do and saw because Stowe was "reproducing the vision of elite British philanthropists," hinting at the common feminist term,...

In the wave of protests that rocked college campuses this fall, one proffered demand was the creation of a system for students to report microaggressions committed by faculty and staff. Presumably, such reporting would be used in faculty evaluations for decisions such as granting tenure and promotions. If new research by University of California-Berkeley and Paris Institute of Political Studies scholars is accurate, such a reporting system would disproportionately harm female instructors. Inside Higher Ed reports that the research found "student evaluations of teaching" (SET) tend to be better at "gauging students' gender bias and grade expectations than they are...

A national women's organization is challenging Gov. Bruce Rauner's appointments to the Illinois Tollway, saying he is violating state law by creating an all-male board. Over the past three months, Rauner has named five male directors and re-appointed another to the nine-member Tollway board, which already included three men. In addition, Rauner backed Greg Bedalov as the agency's new executive director. Bedalov replaced Kristi Lafleur, who had held the post under the tenure of former Gov. Pat Quinn. The National Council of Women's Organizations is charging that Rauner is violating the Illinois Gender Balanced Appointments Act. The 1991 law is...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A California trial judge ruled Saturday that a woman suing a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in a high-profile gender bias case may seek punitive damages that could add tens of millions of dollars to the $16 million in lost wages and bonuses she is pursuing. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn denied a request by lawyers for Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to have Ellen Pao's demand for unspecified punitive damages thrown out. Pao, the interim CEO of the news and social networking site Reddit, claims she was passed over for a promotion at...

If two people are equally unable to give consent, but have sex anyway, should either be charged with a crime? It's a question that many college administrators wrestle with when drugs and alcohol are factors in sexual assault disputes. The verdict often seems to be that male students are uniquely responsible for ascertaining that their sexual partners are in a state of mind to consent, even when the female is the initiator and both are intoxicated.

Here’s a clip from my read-it-and-weep folder. It showed up in a February 11th Washington Post article, headline: “College sexual assault prevention has unlikely model: U.S. service academies.” Midshipmen—that is, trainee officers—at the U.S. Naval Academy are being broken to the state ideology, Cultural Marxism. We listen in on a class discussion. Spirited debate broke out after the sophomores watched a video that said the “three most destructive words” a boy hears when growing up are “be a man.”

Things are pretty volatile in the Chaos Caucus. Every since Republicans took over the Assembly, things have been anything but smooth. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise. After all, even the GOP itself didn’t expect to be in charge of the lower house, and the last time the party was in charge, Ronald Reagan was in the White House and the pinnacle of technology was the Apple IIe desktop computer. You already know about the disastrous election of Ira Hansen, R-Sparks, as speaker. He was undone by ugly sentiments penned in a Sparks newspaper over a long career as...

Farewell to freshman - Washington State to remove 40,000 pieces of legislation of 'gender biased language'...but manhole survives This week new laws will come into effect in Washington State to form the final piece of a six-year effort to rewrite all state laws using gender-neutral vocabulary. The politically correct crusade will see terms such as 'fisherman', 'freshman' and even 'journeyman plumber' replaced with 'fisher', 'first-year-student' and 'journey-level plumber'. Signalling an end to hundreds of years of accepted language, the move will now see the state's copious laws, including thousands of words and phrases re-written at tax-payers expense.

A new book claims that the Obama White House is a boys’ club marred by rampant infighting that has hindered the administration’s economic policy and left top female advisers feeling excluded from key conversations. In an excerpt obtained by The Post, a female senior aide to President Obama called the White House a hostile environment for women. “This place would be in court for a hostile workplace,” former White House communications director Anita Dunn is quoted as saying. “Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.” “I felt like a piece...

If the Senate passes legislation establishing regular “workshops to enhance gender equity” in academic science, what exactly would scientists and engineers do at them? The legislation, already approved by the House, is a little vague beyond directing researchers and heads of academic departments to participate in “activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.” But let me venture one prediction: There will be lots of talk about the male chauvinists on the Swedish Medical Research Council who awarded 20 postdoctoral fellowships in 1994. The analysis of those fellowships, published in Nature in 1997, is the fundamental text...

Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100m girls have disappeared—and the number is rising IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living. Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Two Emirati men are accused of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old French teen, a case that has raised questions about the protection of foreigners and the fairness of a legal system where male rape does not exist as a crime. The defendants — aged 35 and 18 — briefly appeared in court Wednesday where one was appointed a new lawyer. The other defendant's attorney did not appear in court for the hearing, which lasted a few minutes. The two are accused of kidnapping two French teens and sexually assaulting one of them in July. A third...

THE DEBATE over women's place in science, which proved to be the downfall of Harvard President Lawrence Summers after he suggested that male preeminence in the field could be due at least partly to biological traits and personal choices, remains a lightning rod for controversy. Earlier this month, the subject was tackled in two different symposiums - one at Harvard, the other at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based right-of-center think tank. Both events focused on the National Academy of Sciences report issued last fall by an almost all-female NAS committee. The report takes the position that any existing cognitive...

I'm opposed to prison sentences for certain statutory rape situations--in many countries, a 21-year-old man having a relationship with a 17-year-old woman is perfectly normal. A friend's grandparents recently celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary, and it was publicized in local papers, as it should be, since it's such an achievement. But looking at the story and doing a little math made me realize that if the two of them had gotten married yesterday, he would go to jail--he was 21 and she was 17 when they got married in 1922. This is absurd. On the other had, if it's a...

A school board's message: Women good, men bad Barbara Kay, National Post Published: Wednesday, May 30, 2007Note: this column ran on hard copy's Editorial Page The Peel District School Board is one of Canada's largest, as its $1-billion budget, 13,000 academic staff, 145,000 students and 226 schools attest. Imagine the burden of responsibility felt by its trustees, knowing so many tender and malleable young minds are in their hands. So if signing off on an official school board document, a pamphlet say, tasked with guiding thousands of teachers in negotiating sensitive domestic issues with certain students, such a board...