Tag: Gender Gap

The 2024 Election Will Be a Referendum on Abortion and Women’s Equality, According to New Ms. Poll

Next year’s election will see many voters turn out who are motivated by abortion and equal rights for women, according to a new poll by Lake Research Partners for Ms. and the Feminist Majority Foundation, publisher of Ms.  The poll showed that abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) are strong voter turnout issues separately, but even more powerful when combined.

Candidates talking about abortion and the ERA together are particularly mobilizing for Democrat and Independent voters—especially Independent women, younger women, voters who support abortion rights, college-educated women, Latinas and Black voters, and voters ages 30-39. 

It’s Not Just at the Oscars Where Women Filmmakers Are Left Out

This weekend’s Oscar awards have generated headlines about the lack of diversity among nominees—notably, this year, no women were nominated for Best Director. In fact, in the Academy’s 94-year history, it’s nominated just seven women in the category.

Whether the stories told are fiction or nonfiction, there continue to be considerable obstacles for women and nonbinary filmmakers when attempting to break the glass ceiling of storytelling on the big screen. This weekend’s awards ceremony only highlights how much further we still have to go.

Abortion and Equal Rights Are Driving Young Women Voters—and High Turnout Is Expected

Among young women voters ages 18-29 in the battleground states, abortion and women’s rights are the most important and highly motivating issues in determining their vote—22 points higher than inflation. And youth voter turnout is expected to match or exceed the record set in 2018.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade has lit a fire under women voters, and especially young women voters, who have the power to determine close elections,” said Katherine Spillar, executive editor of Ms.

Women Will Be Playing Hardball on TV This Season

“There’s no crying in baseball,” says Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. But the film’s more subtle theme is that there are no lesbians in baseball. The 1992 film made no mention of the fact that many of the athletes in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) were gay.

But last Friday, Amazon Prime Video unveiled an eight-episode series, also called A League of Their Own, that includes openly lesbian AAGPBL players.

Gender Parity Index 2022: Women Continue to Break Records—But We Must Break Down Barriers

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RepresentWomen’s Gender Parity Index (GPI), which weighs women’s representation at the national, state and local levels, shows how incremental and sporadic progress for gender balance truly is. According to this year’s Index, there are no states that have reached gender parity — a basement metric if we’re to call ourselves a truly reflective 21st century democracy. A majority of states earned a “D” grade for women’s representation in government, further proving that we are not even close to fully cheering “shattered ceilings” or taking victory laps for national “broken records.” 

Preserving Our Legacy: ‘An Important Piece of Feminist History Is at Risk of Being Lost’

In the early ’80s, Martha Albertson Fineman launched the Feminism and Legal Theory Project at University of Wisconsin Law School. For decades, the project has brought together scholars and activists from the U.S. and abroad to explore the most pressing contemporary legal issues affecting women. In multiple-day sessions, organized around specific, evolving sets of issues, feminists presented working papers and debated women’s legal rights.

Fineman recorded and preserved these groundbreaking conversations, as well as the working papers and other written material prepared for these sessions. But she is now struggling to find a home for this invaluable archive of the first generation of feminist legal thinkers.

Young Women Vow to Carry the Equal Rights Amendment Across the Finish Line

After realizing that gender equality wasn’t a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, Rosie Couture and her friend Belan Yeshigeta founded Generation Ratify, an organization dedicated to adding the ERA to the Constitution. Other women-led organizations, such as The Feminist Front and The Ruth Project, joined the fight.

“Advocating for the ERA means advocating for a fight that began with many of our grandmothers.”