More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Academy Award nominations used multi-winner, proportional ranked-choice voting; Columbia University names its first woman president; some members of the New York City Council continue to have questions about ranked-choice voting, despite its giving voters more voice and more choice; and more.
At the U.S. border with Mexico, under the notorious Title 42 policy, the pandemic is still routinely invoked to justify expelling immigrants seeking asylum without any semblance of review or due process.
Many criticize the Title 42 order as unnecessary, overreaching and cruel. Nonetheless, the policy has resulted in over 2.4 million expulsions to date—and counting.
“The resignation of Jacinda Ardern reminds us that women continue to face barriers in politics, and that it is essential to build governmental workplaces that enable all to participate and succeed,” said Cynthia Richie Terrell, executive director and founder of RepresentWomen. “Even as leaders like Ardern have advanced women’s political representation, the pace of progress remains unacceptably sluggish.”
As we approach the first year in nearly 50 without the federal protections Roe offered, local and state leaders have a clear mandate to follow the science and meaningfully expand abortion access. There is still so much more we can and must do to ensure all who need abortion care can access it—and elected representatives have no excuse to not push proactive bills forward.
In Iran, control over women was a key part of the platform of the Islamist regime that officially took power in 1979, and their laws remain in effect today—for now. Here are some of the most egregious ones on the books.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Sunday, Jan. 22, Swedish-American artist Michele Pred created a 50-foot snow drawing of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol in a park nearby the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where the film PLAN C about abortion pills premiered the next day.
On Jan. 25, reproductive health advocates filed two federal lawsuits—one in North Carolina and West Virginia—challenging state laws imposing medically unnecessary restrictions on physicians prescribing the abortion pill mifepristone to their patients. Both cases argue that state laws are preempted by U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules allowing telemedicine abortion and mailing of mifepristone.
“States cannot substitute their medical and scientific judgments for judgments FDA has made, and doing so undermines not only access to medication, but the country’s entire drug regulation system.”
I have spent the last few months scouring catalogs and websites, receiving hundreds of books and even more emails from authors, publicists and publishers, reading your book Tweets and DMs, all to find out what books are coming out in 2023 that I think you, my exceptional, inquisitive and discerning Ms readers, will want to hear about.
Here’s your TBR (to be read) for the year. Enjoy!
By 2018, Johnny Depp was bordering on irrelevancy—but he soon gained a tremendous fandom as a public trial unfolded, prompted by abuse allegations from his ex-wife Amber Heard. In December, Heard announced she would no longer be moving forward with her appeal because “cannot afford to risk an impossible bill—one that is not just financial, but also psychological, physical and emotional.”
Depp has paved a new path for accused men in search of cultural capital—and accomplished the very thing women throughout the ages have been baselessly accused of: leveraging victimhood to gain status. Depp, whose career was flailing, became not just a rallying cry for men’s rights and the supposed victimhood of being a successful, wealthy, white man in a changing world, but a newly hot commodity in Hollywood once again with a thriving fan base.
About 70 percent of the world population now lives in autocracies, up from 49 percent a decade ago. Yet the rising tide of authoritarian governments, many still masquerading as democracies, has met a formidable foe: resistance led by students, especially young women.
Inclusive, gender-equitable democracies serve to reduce poverty and foster a more empowered populace and peaceful future. Closing the education gap for girls and women in all their diversity is key to those achievements.