Since Ukraine has been in the news so much this week, on the 1-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, I thought I’d look into the history of women’s rights in Ukraine. This is necessarily brief, given that I don’t have a whole lot of time and am no expert. But here is what I found.
Prior to 2014, the Ukrainian administration of Viktor Yanukovych was apparently corrupt and pro-Russia, and women and allies protested accordingly. Demands included free trade with the EU and new protections for civil rights.
Unfortunately, I could not find information on gender breakdowns for Ukrainian election results, but presumably with women “pivotal” in the earlier protests, women remained heavily engaged during the following elections.
Disapproval of the Yanukovych administration was so widespread that it was disbanded, resulting in the election of 2014, which Ukrainian billionaire Petro Poroshenko won in a landslide, despite pro-Russian partisans disrupting elections in some areas.
However, change was not sufficient for many, and the Poroshenko administration also seemed to continue much of the corruption. So in 2019, Volodymyr Zelenskyy won his election in a landslide on a promise of change, despite a notable lack of real-world political experience (remember, he was a comedian playing a Ukrainian president on TV!). In what now seems a supreme irony, it was said of Zelenskyy at the time [bolding mine]:
His critics [including the replaced Poroshenko], meanwhile, are sceptical about his credentials, with many expressing concern over his close links to the billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.
They have expressed doubts that he will be able to take on the country's influential oligarchs and stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I guess he’s shown them.
So where does that leave Ukrainian women? Much better under Zelenskyy, as explained by Ukrainian author Kateryna Odarchenko:
Ukrainian legislation upholds women’s rights, and specifically opens up opportunities for women (as well as men) to participate in the political life of the nation at high levels. But the country is far from achieving gender equality, both in daily life and in the political arena. In part, some entrenched stereotypes and administrative obstacles prevent Ukrainians from achieving equality between men and women. Societal perceptions of women in politics are positive; however, the results of the 2021 local elections demonstrate differences in trust in women politicians between urban and rural areas. An outstanding question is how to reframe Ukrainian society and the political system in a way that would advance gender equality in Ukraine writ large.
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Nonetheless, according to the Global Gender Gap Index 2020, Ukraine has closed 72 percent of the gender gap in the past three years, placing it among the top third of countries. This survey is based on a comparison of women and men in such categories as economic participation and opportunities (labor force participation, wage equality for similar work, income), educational attainment (literacy, enrollment in education), health and survival (sex ratio at birth and healthy life expectancy), and political empowerment (women in politics). For comparison, the top five countries on the Global Gender Gap rating have closed at least 80 percent of the gap, with Iceland, number one, having closed 82 percent of its gender gap. Both legislation and activism have contributed to Ukraine’s progress, and a greater involvement of women in politics should see continuing erosion of the gap.
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Opinion polls yield optimistic forecasts about Ukrainian women’s future engagement in politics. The same Razumkov Centre poll that elicited a strong belief among respondents that women’s top job was in the house and home also showed that 82 percent of Ukrainian citizens have a positive attitude toward the fact of women entering politics, and 39 percent believe there are too few women in Ukrainian politics. The poll results indicated that almost half of Ukrainians want to see more women in the Cabinet of Ministers, the Verkhovna Rada, and among local elected officials. And 54 percent of respondents believed that not enough parties in Ukraine represented the interests of women.
Ukraine’s women will no doubt be building on these successes for more progress, as soon as the war is over — and maybe even before.
In Other News
Injustice
From Pro Publica- 94 Women Allege a Utah Doctor Sexually Assaulted Them. Here’s Why a Judge Threw Out Their Case.
In short, anything that happens during a medical visit is considered medical malpractice, not criminal. Ugh!
“Sexual assault, to me, is not medical care. Period…. It’s sad that we need to clarify that sexual assault is not medical care. But trying to tie sexual assault to a medical malpractice [filing deadline] — it’s just wrong.”
Opinion
A man who killed his wife with a hammer is set to be released. With probation in tatters, who will protect us?
Joanna Simpson’s family are right to be worried — too many violent offenders slip through the cracks of a service that is there to keep us safe.
https://www.theguardian.com/…:
Suella Braverman’s announcement this week that police will have to treat domestic violence as a national threat, like terrorism, is a welcome move from the home secretary after a spate of disturbing, high-profile cases. But it also shines an awkward spotlight on what happens long after the police, courts and prison service have supposedly done their job.
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It’s always a leap of faith when a cell door is unlocked, and we’re all expected just to trust that overstretched prisons have still managed to achieve some kind of rehabilitation, or at least that if there’s any danger of a relapse someone will quickly step in. But without a properly functioning probation service, that leap of faith becomes just too big to make, and confidence in the rest of the system collapses. It shouldn’t be left to frightened individual families, fighting their own lonely battles, to make that point.
Police
Revealed: one in 100 police officers in England and Wales faced a criminal charge last year
Figure has surged over the past 10 years with pressure growing for officers to be sacked on the spot.
https://www.theguardian.com/…:
London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has now written to the home secretary asking her to urgently push through new laws allowing police chiefs to sack rogue officers on the spot. Although the Home Office is currently reviewing policing’s dismissal processes following the failure to remove Carrick as a serving officer, Khan is frustrated that existing laws mean that the Met is still being forced to employ officers who have committed serious offences.
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The Met admitted last month it is investigating 1,000 sexual and domestic abuse claims involving about 800 of its officers. Khan wrote to Suella Braverman on Friday, stating “it is incomprehensible to the public that under current regulations the Met can be required to reinstate serving officers convicted of a criminal offence”. A Home Office source said Khan’s intervention was an attempt to “cover up for years of failure in which as commissioner responsible for the Met police he has done very little”. A review of the police’s disciplinary system has months left to run, but Khan warns “profound changes to police vetting, conduct and misconduct processes are urgently needed”.Khan, responsible for setting the strategic direction and budget of the Met, writes: “This transformation must be supported by radical reform of the legislative framework to empower police chiefs and give them the tools they need to take fair and effective executive action to remove anyone falling short of the high standards expected by the police, community and the public.”
Abusive Politics
Opinion
Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like Trump and Putin
Like all abusive men, dictators seek to control who can speak and which narratives are believed. The only difference is scale.
https://www.theguardian.com/… [bolding mine]:
… Another way that studies of domestic abuse inform our political understanding is “Darvo”, an acronym that the domestic violence expert Jennifer Freyd coined in 1997 for how abusers respond in court or when otherwise challenged. It stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. You insist that anyone mentioning what you’ve done is insulting you, is a liar, then insist that your accuser is the abuser and you are the victim, and keep shouting it until you believe it and maybe convince others. Freyd herself, with another psychologist, recently noted “a growing trend in the world of civil litigation: alleged perpetrators of interpersonal violence are filing defamation lawsuits against the individuals who have named them as abusers … For abusers, these lawsuits are an opportunity to enforce Darvo through civil litigation.”
Darvo happens all the time in political life. In the US, the Republicans have a pattern of claiming to defend what they’re attacking and to be the victims of what they’re perpetrating. Or as the New York Times columnist Charles M Blow put it in January, describing the agenda of the new Republican majority in the lower house of Congress: “Understanding that they can’t throw federal investigators off the trail of multiple conservatives – including, and perhaps principally, Donald Trump – they have decided to complicate those investigations by kicking up so much dust that the public has a hard time discerning fact from fiction.” The very mention of those crimes is treated as an insult and an outrage, with those complicit the offended parties, and so they shout down the evidence. Prolonged loud noise is an effective tactic.
Healthcare
Illinois Nurses Assn file federal class action suit on behalf of all affected workers, alleging wage theft by the nationwide Ascension Catholic non-profit health system based in St. Louis.
The lawsuit, filed Feb. 22, claims Ascension has attempted to cut labor costs while at the same time increasing executive pay, which has led to staffing problems [at Ascension hospitals around the country]. "Ascension has had to resort to more complex forms of compensation in order to induce extra work at lower levels of staffing," the lawsuit states. "But [Ascension] has unlawfully cut corners even here by failure to fully provide their employees the correct compensation."
They allege they have experienced the health system's failure to pay correct amounts, including incorrect wages, incorrect paid time off, incorrect disability benefits and incorrect wage payouts as part of a fully agreed-to settlement of a contract grievance. The lawsuit alleges that because the payroll department is located in St. Louis, the workers in Joliet have been unable to have their complaints resolved in a timely manner. Plaintiffs also allege that Ascension has been "unwilling or unable to fix their mistakes and accurately compensate these workers." The lawsuit asks Ascension to take responsibility for what it owes plaintiffs and other employees for their work.
Workplace
CNN Business: A generation of high-profile women tech leaders have stepped aside. What’s next?
This is interesting in that if there was mentoring of up-and-coming women who might take over from the women who have been leaving, it doesn’t seem to have resulted in immediate benefits in these instances. We’ve discussed here at WOW previously that women cannot feel that their work is done when they are the first to break the glass ceiling. From the article [bolding mine]:
Having women in top leadership positions is crucial as it gives entry-level women role models and mentorship opportunities “from leaders who may have faced similar challenges as they rose through the ranks.”
This representation at the very top is critical for women in middle management, the point at which women tend to see their higher career aspirations realized or thwarted. “Without women in the C-suite who have come before them, it could make this transition period tougher for next generation women leaders,” Kray said.
Fashion
Interview
Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri on bridging feminism and fashion: ‘The male gaze is seen as the perspective that matters’
Feminist slogans on T-shirts are all very well, but has the creative director of the venerable French house really rewritten the rules of women’s fashion?
https://www.theguardian.com/...:
Chiuri’s six years at Dior have been about feminism as much as fashion. When luxury brands collaborate with female artists and talk about empowerment, what they usually mean is dressing actors for the red carpet or making jumpsuits for a pop star’s stadium tour. Dior is no slouch on that front – Olivia Colman, Natalie Portman and Anya Taylor-Joy were gowned-up for the last Oscars – but Chiuri goes much further. In January 2020, Dior’s haute couture collection was shown inside The Female Divine, a kind of vast blow-up birth canal designed by American feminist artist Judy Chicago and installed in the garden of the Musée Rodin in Paris. It was decorated with embroidered slogans including “If women ruled the world would buildings resemble wombs?” which Chicago said was a rallying call against the phallicism of urban architecture. Two years earlier, Chiuri enlisted the escaramuzas, daredevil female Mexican rodeo riders whose costumes are drawn from the uniforms of women who fought in the Mexican revolution, to star in a show; that same year she collaborated with Israeli feminist choreographer Sharon Eyal to have sinewy, bodysuited dancers weave around the models on the catwalk, a representation of women’s right to control their bodies and the space around them. I could go on.
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Chiuri always talks about women, plural, rather than about a woman. This is unusual in fashion, which is structurally individualistic – a woman buying a dress is buying it to empower herself, not the sisterhood. A female consumer reaching for her wallet is, in the slick language of commodified feminism, owning her beauty, her sexuality, her power. “I don’t like so much the word empowerment,” Chiuri says. “If we are going to challenge the patriarchy, women need to speak more about sisterhood and community. Real feminism is about women supporting each other.”
Intersectional stem
Black, Latina, and Native American Women could be the key to an effective Cybersecurity Workforce
Cyberattacks continue to target our major employers, government offices, healthcare systems, and utility infrastructure. In 2021, cybercrime damage cost businesses in the U.S. more than $6.9 billion, according to noted cybersecurity expert Chuck Brooks ... Our problem in combating cybercrime is that organizations cannot protect themselves without a talented workforce trained in cybersecurity. Despite the critical need for more talent, a workforce shortage persists at an alarming rate: there are more than 700,000 cybersecurity job openings in the U.S.
If solving this problem was as easy as offering competitive salaries, there wouldn’t be a shortage. There is a lot to be done to fill these vacancies, but one solution is to support and encourage populations who might not otherwise think to enter the IT field to do so. For example, Black, Latina, and Native American (BLNA) women represent approximately 16 percent of the total U.S. population, yet they make up only 4 percent of students obtaining bachelor’s degrees in computing. By training and preparing BLNA women to pursue a career in cybersecurity, we are not only alleviating this shortage, but introducing fresh, qualified talent into our workforce.
Nationwide, only 25 percent of tech graduates are women, with a dropout rate of 37 percent for tech classes compared to 30 percent for other programs. If this trend continues, the number of underrepresented women of color receiving computing degrees will not double until 2052—by which time they will represent an increasingly smaller proportion of all graduates....
Please Note: As always, this WOW column is a group effort! Many thanks for items and discussion this week to SandraLLAP, mettle fatigue, and Angmar!