More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: celebrating AAPI women leaders and exploring AAPI women’s representation; most countries provide part-time childcare access from the age of 3; Senate confirms Lisa Cook to the Federal Reserve Board; in the workplace, “the selection of incompetent men over competent women is the number one problem we need to fix”; and more.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in in this biweekly round-up.
This week: A leaked Supreme Court draft decision would overturn landmark Roe v. Wade ruling; new library program will secure access to “banned books” for teens; Oklahoma Heartbeat Act bans abortion after six weeks; Karine Jean-Pierre appointed first Black White House press secretary; and more.
Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are consistently underrepresented in leadership positions and underpaid even with higher qualifications—a phenomenon known as the bamboo ceiling. In the meantime, Anti-AAPI hate, correlated with racialized rhetoric about the coronavirus, rose by 339 percent in 2021—over two times the rise in 2020 of 124 percent.
Rather than flowers that wilt, what most mothers really want is underlying systemic change that benefits not just them, but their entire family system. Reshma Saujani’s initiative, Marshall Plan for Moms, a campaign of her nonprofit Girls Who Code, has set out to do just that.
“‘Mom guilt’ is the natural result of two totally unattainable societal ideals clashing: the perfect mom and ideal worker.”
For nearly 50 years, as anti-abortion legislators in states around the country have chipped away at the constitutional right to a safe and legal abortion, they have done so with the steady drumbeat of violence at their back. In the face of the recent leak of a draft opinion from Justice Samuel Alito that confirmed that the Supreme Court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade, abortion advocates and providers are bracing for a surge in clinic violence.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Brazilians are taking representation into their own hands by power-sharing political seats; there are still too few groups to address the scale of the global gender gap; Nan Whaley wins Democratic nomination for governor, becoming the first woman nominated by a major party in Ohio; and more.
This Mother’s Day, we must recognize how politics has excluded mothers and work to create an inclusive politics where mothers’ voices can be heard.
The Supreme Court says it is time to “return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” But state legislatures are overwhelmingly white and male: Women hold just 31 percent of statehouse seats, and only 9 percent are women of color. Rates of women’s representation are much lower in states that will ban abortion if and when Roe is overturned.
Luckily, we know how to transform the demographics of U.S. law-making bodies. We just need the political will.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) this weekend became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Ukraine since the start of Russia’s invasion, after she led a small delegation of Democratic lawmakers on an unannounced visit to Kyiv. She described the trip as a “solemn opportunity and extraordinary honor.”
It’s been women’s progress—the right to vote, to own property, for reproductive rights and for civil rights for all people—that has led to an expansion of democracy globally in the 20th century. We must be prepared for what is nothing less than major battles for the survival and advancement of women’s rights—and our very democracy.
