More Than A Magazine, A Movement
As the nationwide formula shortage gained more news coverage, social media outlets like Twitter started buzzing—not with compassion for these scared parents, but rather judgment that these mothers hadn’t breastfed and were therefore at fault for their current predicament.
(Of course, the irony of the formula shortage happening at the same time that the Supreme Court is poised to force American women to carry unwanted pregnancies is also not lost on many.)
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.
Someone like Elon Musk, who wants to empower people who abuse the power of social media, is not going to improve our digital lives. Already, women and other marginalized people face widespread abuse and harassment online, with very little recourse against people who target them.
Nearly 40 percent of women have personally been targeted by online violence. Jigsaw, a unit inside Google, hopes to make the internet safer place for women and people of color.
“Building this tool is a part of Jigsaw’s broader mission to protect democracies through technology,” said Google Jigsaw’s head of partnerships and business development Patricia Georgiou.
Earlier this month, Korea’s presidential election brought the conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol and his decidedly anti-feminist party into power. But the groundswell of activism and resistance won’t go away. In fact, some think it will only grow stronger.
It will take a paradigm shift to defend our national security moving forward. And we know women and people of color should be at the forefront of this effort. The #ShareTheMicInCyber, campaign highlights the experiences of Black practitioners in the field of cybersecurity, driving a critical conversation on race in the industry.
Thirty years after the 1992 Year of the Woman, women are still underrepresented in governor positions, but research shows there’s hope to increase these numbers: More than a dozen women are running for governor across the country, and it’s clear that women candidates have made great progress. However, women running for governor are still held back by sexist stereotypes and double standards.
Amid a well-documented deluge of online abuse, new data shows that physical violence targeting women in politics is also increasing in most regions of the world, creating additional—and at times deadly—obstacles to women’s participation in political processes.
As feminist activists take advantage of the U.N. Women 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence globally and as the U.S. Department of State Summit for Democracy launches in the United States, we must recognize that women who challenge the status quo and speak out against injustice and inequality are facing an increasing amount of online abuse.
Gendered disinformation and online abuse against women in politics are not only a problem for the women who are targeted, but undermine women’s rights and democracy at large.
Right-wing outlets—and sometimes mainstream ones, too—tell us that individual professors are being silenced by a “woke orthodoxy” that is overtaking college campuses.
From where I sit at a state university in the Pacific Northwest, this is incredibly ironic. My experience has been precisely the opposite: The faculty loudly decrying their victimhood are the ones who succeed in silencing the rest of us.
