Sorry this is late: I'm doing another fill-in this week, and really need people to sign up to cover future editions.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was at an event for women in tech when he was asked how women should handle asking for raises in an industry where their salaries lag significantly behind men's. His response was astonishing:
“It’s not really about asking for a raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will give you the right raise,” he said. “That, I think, might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have. Because that’s good karma. It’ll come back because somebody’s going to know that’s the kind of person that I want to trust. "
Or maybe that's not so astonishing. Isn't this what women are always told? Be a good girl, don't make waves, don't make demands like a "bitch." Women who ask for raises are
likely to suffer a backlash that men don't get, and women who try to negotiate salary are less likely to get the job.
Nadella later walked it back, saying that he felt the industry needed to move beyond individual solutions and close the pay gap (not kidding!), but in the meantime, women absolutely should advocate for themselves. I think it was Echidne who observed that if nothing else, this is exactly when any woman working for Microsoft should ask for a raise, while the media spotlight is on.
The good, the bad and the ugly below the orange flying toaster.
The Susan G. Komen Foundation, the folks who put pink ribbons on everything for breast cancer, lost a lot of credibility with their activism against reproductive choice. They've also embraced just about any product where the company was willing to give them money (pink ribbons on bottles of booze just don't make a whole lot of sense.) But a pink fracking drill bit, with all the cancer-causing carcinogens that fracking releases into the environment, pretty much redefines irony.
States with the most abortion restrictions have the worst health outcomes for women.
While the school-to-prison pipeline is seen as primarily affecting young minority men, it takes its toll on young women of color as well.
The number one industry in the US for sexual harassment is food service.
One young woman was killed this week, and another critically injured, when they were attacked for refusing the attentions of street harassers.
There's been a lot of good writing recently about affirmative consent, the simple concept that consent is opt-in, not opt-out. That's the same standard we have for theft, trespassing, or kidnapping. I may enjoy spending money, having people in my home, or having someone else take my kid for the day, but each requires me to explicitly agree to it. Yet when it comes to rape, we switch to a totally different standard: the victim must resist, and other people feel free to weigh in on whether she resisted "enough." Here's Thomas MacAulay Millar explaining what California's "Yes means Yes" statute does and doesn't say.
Here's Erin Gloria Ryan cutting through the nonsense arguments that treat consent as an obstacle instead of a good thing. Here's Mallory Ortberg:
Twice in my life I have had to fight for my safety. Twice in my life I have physically pushed a man out of my home. Twice in my life I have thrown a man off of me and locked myself in a room where he could not come after me, until he left, until someone else came to help me. It took every ounce of physical and emotional strength that I had. It was exhausting. It was frightening. Had I been the slightest bit more tired, had I been at someone else’s house, had I not had the hope of someone else’s arrival to sustain me, I might have fought and lost. To Ellen and her mother, I might be an example of a “good” near-rape victim.
I should not have had to do it either time. The first time I said No, the first time I turned my head away, the first time I crossed my arms over my chest and walked away, the first time I said “What are you doing?”, the first time I displayed a clear and obvious distaste for what was being done to me rather than with me should have been enough. That expectation — that the person saying No should be prepared at any moment to fight someone else off – is an undue burden. Pretending that active consent is ambiguous and confusing and difficult to obtain is a pernicious lie that has no basis in reality. It is abundantly clear when someone is eager and ready to sleep with you.
Extraordinary Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai is the youngest
Nobel Peace Prize winner at 17, sharing the prize with children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi.
Much more at ramara's excellent diary on the International Day of the Girl Child.