Story here. Excerpt:

'An alumnus recently filed a Title IX investigation against Boston College through the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) after being found responsible for a sexual assault in 2012. The student served a three-semester suspension, but DNA evidence released the February following his suspension did not corroborate the student’s guilt. The student maintains he was wrongly accused. As a result, the student filed a lawsuit against the University on Dec. 4, 2015, complaining that the school is in violation of Title IX, seeking damages and that BC be mandated to comply with Title IX.

Katie O’Dair, BC’s Title IX coordinator, said that this lawsuit lands BC on the list of 161 institutions who are under review.

“This is the first time BC has been involved in an OCR investigation of a sexual violence complaint,” O’Dair said in an email. “Boston College is fully cooperating with the OCR in its review.”'

More from the presume-male-guilty file here. Excerpt:

'A 13-year-old Russian-German girl has admitted making up a story about being kidnapped and raped by migrants in a case that triggered a furore in Germany and briefly embroiled Berlin police in a spat with the Kremlin, state prosecutors said.

The parents of the teenager, named only as Lisa, reported her missing on 11 January after she failed to appear at school in the Marzahn district of the capital. She reappeared 30 hours later with injuries on her face, and told her parents she had been attacked by men of Middle Eastern or north African appearance. News of the incident spread on social media, sparking outrage among Berlin’s Russian-German community.

But when she was questioned by trained specialists three days later “she immediately admitted that the story of the rape was not true”, said the spokesman for the state prosecutor, Martin Steltner.

Link here. Excerpt:

'Ibrahim Mohamed discovered that Somali-American women in Shakopee had more challenges than most: they didn’t know much about exercise and couldn’t find a women-only environment to work out, which many Muslim women prefer.
...
Mohamed, president of the Shakopee Diversity Alliance, applied for and received the Neighborhood Health Connections grant from Allina Health and St. Francis Regional Medical Center. He used the $10,300, intended for health-related programming, to create the Somali Women’s Exercise program, or Somali Jimisci.
...
The first group of 30 women graduated from the program last week. Participants tried Zumba, yoga and strength training classes at the River Valley YMCA in Prior Lake, and swimming lessons at the East Junior High pool in Shakopee. Both locations limited the classes to women only. The YMCA bought shades for the doors to keep spaces private, Mohamed said.
...
In Somalia, girls play sports like basketball at school and women walk outside for exercise, Mohamed said.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II once observed that it is the task of the law to form and project as well as mirror and reflect—that is, to shape behavior while also expressing society’s understanding of proper conduct. Over the last 40 years, American society has introduced dramatic changes in rape law, changes aimed at making criminal prosecutions and convictions easier. The reforms have succeeded in altering society’s understanding of sexually motivated assault, but the revised law has not adequately mirrored and reflected society’s views on the appropriate sanctions. The result has been a failure to increase in any significant way the number of prosecutions and convictions for rape, particularly alleged rape by an acquaintance of the accused. To summarize: reformers have captured the law and reshaped it to conform to their notions of right and wrong but failed to take account of the sentiments of the general public, which has sent the message that the reforms have gone too far.

Article here. Excerpt:

'For many years, the social science on children’s well-being as it relates to parenting arrangements post-divorce has been building up. By now it is clear that children do better with two parents involved in their lives. But judicial action on child custody and parenting time has changed little over the years, leaving millions of children with little or no contact with their fathers following divorce. Indeed, nationwide data indicate that about one-third of children of divorce have no contact with their father. In Nebraska, a 2013 survey of child custody cases revealed that children are granted just 17% of parenting time with their non-custodial parents, typically their father.

This extreme disconnect between what social science demonstrates is unquestionably in children’s best interest and what judges order has led many to wonder what family court judges are being taught about the matter. Soon, the people of Nebraska will know the answer to that vital question.'

Essay here . Excerpt:

'Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard felt it was appropriate in 2011 to rebrand ‘Male Chauvinism’ as ‘Misogyny.’  The reasoning behind her decision was she did not think men took the term ‘male chauvinist’ seriously since its inception in the 60’s/70’s. She felt that the term had lost its bite.

The 1970’s man would have take offence to being called a male chauvinist pig. Through female overuse, the term has lost its punch to the point most men don’t even remember that Chauvinism was even a label, never mind a bad label.

Women are prone to demanding the redefinition of words because they feel that they are not inclusive enough to satisfy female emotional pride. Two recent examples:

Press release here. Excerpt:

'The National Coalition For Men (NCFM) calls on Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and all other candidates to be honest about the gender "pay gap." Claiming that women "earn less" without explaining why is misleading and dishonest. The Department of Labor funded a study that showed the pay gap is mostly due to choices, not discrimination. http://commons.wikimannia.org/images/Gender_Wage_Gap_Final_Report_2009.pdf

Story here. Excerpt:

'A Los Angeles Police Department detective was arrested today on charges of threatening an ex-boyfriend and having him arrested by filing a false police report claiming she had been sexually assaulted.

Christine Wycoff, 44, was freed on $150,000 bond, and is scheduled to be arraigned Feb. 22 in downtown Los Angeles on charges of dissuading a witness and false imprisonment, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

According to prosecutors, Wycoff met the alleged victim online in June 2014 and pair had a sexual relationship that lasted several months. When the relationship soured, Wycoff allegedly threatened the man, who reported it to the LAPD.

While the LAPD was conducting an internal investigation, Wycoff allegedly told the man that if he cooperated with the probe, she would accuse him of domestic violence, prosecutors said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Feminists in the workplace just keep finding new issues to harp on. In her op-ed in Forbes, Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of the Independent Women’s Forum, shares how “Success if Never Enough For Some ‘Feminists,’ Including Sheryl Sandberg.”

Schaeffer begins with a mention as to how “fascinated” Alexis de Tocqueville would be, if he were alive today, by “the rise of female entrepreneurs of the highest level, who lament inequalities facing women today and have made it their public purpose to push for women’s “success.””

Article here. Excerpt:

'Representatives Jason Dunnington and Emily Virgin want to make it illegal for an employer in Oklahoma to pay women less than men for comparable work.

The bill would allow female employees who feel they’re being discriminated against to file a complaint with the Labor Department.

“The Labor Department would contact the employer and then would seek records and would do an investigation on whether that’s the case and whether or not that employer was making a practice of paying females less for the same work as males,” Dunnington said.

The bill would also make it illegal to fire a woman because she made a wage claim.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Jenny Morris had a "light bulb" moment teaching an Advanced Placement physics class at Prairie Ridge High School last year.

"I had 16 boys and zero girls," she said.

It prompted Morris to launch Crystal Lake High School District 155's first GEMS (Girls in Engineering, Math, and Science) Conference to be held Saturday.

Sixth- through eighth-graders from feeder schools in Cary, Crystal Lake, Fox River Grove, Prairie Grove, and a portion of Lake in the Hills are invited to attend the free conference and explore careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).'

Article here. Excerpt:

'It's one of the biggest puzzles in education. Since the 1950s, boys in America been falling behind girls in school. They have more trouble graduating high school, and are less likely to get college diplomas.

Though there have been many theories for the gender gap in academic achievement, this remains a hotly debated issue. Is it the culture? Do girls get more encouragement to succeed in their studies? Is there something biological going on? Do boys mature too late? Are they just more fragile at young ages?

And what if this is the human race's destiny? "What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?" Hanna Rosin wondered in her provocative Atlantic essay from 2010.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'In his final year in office, President Barack Obama is returning to an issue that was at the heart of the first piece of legislation he ever signed at the White House: equal pay.

Obama on Friday unveiled new rules that would compel companies with more than 100 employees to provide the federal government annual data for how much they pay employees based on gender, race and ethnicity.

That information would be used to help public enforcement of equal pay laws while giving more insight into discriminatory pay practices, he said from the White House.

“What kind of example does paying women less set for our sons and daughters?” Obama asked.

The proposal would cover more than 63 million employees — potentially providing a new wealth of data for understanding the pay gap issue and determining whether certain workers are getting short-changed.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Ryerson Students’ Union (RSU) rejected the last appeal by the Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) to become an officially sanctioned student group.

RSU president Andrea Bartlett said that the group cannot appeal any further.

MIAS, which styles itself as “a space for Ryerson students and affiliates to discuss the issues facing men and boys today,” first applied for campus group status in October. The RSU’s Board of Directors has consistently rejected the group — the latest attempt to establish a men’s issues organization on campus.

“What we’re doing is really raising issues that have never been [talked] about or usually disregarded,” said Kevin Arriola, MIAS’s president."'

Article here. Excerpt:

'“We shouldn’t be afraid of the word ‘feminist’. Men and women should use it to describe themselves anytime they want,” said Justin Trudeau, as the audience at Davos World Economic Forum broke into hoots and applause. We’ve heard this before, from Malala Yousafzai, from Emma Watson, Beyoncé, Ellen Page, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Louise Brealy, and John Legend. Every time someone, as well-known as they are, has made this point, there’s a sizeable dent in the patriarchy-sized wall we’ve been trying to smash so long. But if I had a dollar – or a British Pound, I hear it’s doing better – for every time a politician made this statement, well, let’s say I’d be eating a cheap breakfast, because feminist politicians are hard to come by.

Trudeau’s election was a special one from the beginning. He kicked off his campaign at the Vancouver Pride Parade. And when he did win, he brought in an ethnically diverse and gender-balanced cabinet of ministers. And last Friday, he boldly embraced feminism, personally and politically. But what’s most important about his Davos speech is what came before that.

He talks about how he wants to raise his sons “to be feminists like dad,” and that it was his wife Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau, who brought up the issue in the first place. Feminist parent duo to raise feminist daughter and sons? Yes, please!