Article here. Excerpt:

'You go, girls!

Young women in New York have closed the pay gap and actually earn more money than their male peers, a new study shows.

Female millennials bring in $1.02 for every $1 earned by young men in New York, according to new number-crunching by the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

The shattered glass ceiling is likely connected to New York women's high education rate, with 47% of 25- to 34-year-old women in the state holding a bachelor's degree or better, compared to just 38% of men.

"Things are changing," says study director Ariane Hegewisch. "You can see the impact of young women going to college and developing themselves. They are being given opportunities."'

Story here. Excerpt:

'Continuing her work to address student sexual assault, Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) has just introduced a bill that would permit community colleges to extend their jurisdiction beyond their campus borders for sexual assault and other serious student conduct violations.

Senate Bill 186 will allow community college districts to use their disciplinary process to expel or suspend students for off-campus behavior that is determined to be "egregious," such as sexual assault, physical abuse, threats of violence, arson-related offenses, sexual harassment, stalking and hazing. UC and CSU campuses already have such extended jurisdictions in place. But as a result of current law, community colleges have had no recourse when inappropriate student behavior occurs outside campus boundaries.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The manspreading scourge is real. Men Taking Up Too Much Space on the Train offers a robust body of evidence. And some city transit departments are even fighting back. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York is running a campaign encouraging men to limit their legs to a single seat. The campaign features a list of "do's" and "no's," including "Dude… Stop the Spread, Please" in the no column with a little picture of a man who appears to be in goddess pose.
...
I'd love to lean over and politely ask my V-shaped seatmate to move his legs, but cooperation is hardly guaranteed. Some men think they're endowed by their creator to manspread. When Gothamist rode the New York City subway and confronted manspreading passengers, one rider said, "We have no choice to have our legs like that. You know what I mean? It's different for a woman."

Story here. Excerpt:

'Barnard College, the all-women companion school to Columbia University, has announced that its students will be exempted from mandatory sexual assault education at the school on the grounds that its female student body “[doesn't] need it as much as much as Columbia students do.”
...
“It seemed premature to require something that took a hold on registration or a hold on a diploma, because we didn’t feel we had enough information,” Zavadil told a meeting of Columbia’s student government.

This non-involvement comes despite the fact that Barnard students have helped to craft Columbia’s new sexual assault policies. In addition, Barnard is under a federal investigation for potential Title IX violations based on the mishandling of sexual assault, so it is hardly exempt from any problems pertaining to sexual assault at Columbia. Its decision to opt out is unlikely to quiet critics who worry that campus crusades against sexual assault are simply turning into the vilification of men.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A professor who taught anatomy and physiology and was highly regarded by both his students and fellow faculty members was shot and killed by his ex-wife in an apparent murder-suicide at the University of South Carolina, a coroner said Friday.

Sunghee Kwon shot Raja Fayad several times in the upper body Thursday afternoon in a fourth-floor office at the university's Public Health building, Richland County Coroner Gary Watts said in a news release.

Kwan then committed suicide with a gunshot to her stomach, the coroner said. A 9 mm pistol with an empty magazine was found near the bodies, State Law Enforcement Division spokesman Thom Berry said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Domestic violence advocates say last week's murder-suicide at the University of South Carolina is a chilling reminder that men are also the victims of domestic abuse.

Advocates say that statistically more men are abusers than women, but they do help men who are victims themselves, and advocates believe many cases of domestic violence against men may go unreported.

“There are women who are perpetrators of domestic violence and it can be deadly,” Safe Harbor Executive Director Becky Callaham told WYFF News 4’s Ashley Swann.

“There are men who are being abused and being abused right now. And I think the stigma attached to it is so much worse for a man that men are reluctant to ask for help."'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The factors most commonly thought to contribute to crime - a lack of education (half of prisoners have no qualifications, compared with 15 per cent of the general population); experiences of violence or abuse as a child (41 per cent of prisoners witnessed domestic violence as a child and almost a third experienced abuse); financial difficulties, and so on—affect men and women alike. Yet from pickpocketing to white collar crime to assault, men are more likely to offend than women.

For a long time, this phenomenon was overlooked. Criminological research and theory focused almost exclusively on men, without explicitly questioning why the gap existed. But as feminist theorists started demanding a closer look at such differences the crime gap rose to light, and from the 1970s onwards various explanations were presented. Today, although there is still no universally-accepted explanation, most criminologists point to socialised gender roles and the different expectations of male and female behaviour.
...
Some people have of course argued that it is biological rather than sociological: that men are naturally more violent, for example, or that they’re stronger and therefore more capable of committing some crimes. These assumptions might explain why it took so long for anyone to question the different levels of crime among men and women. But as Heidensohn points out, most crimes are not violent in nature and can’t be put down to physical differences: the most common crimes in the UK are motoring offences. Men do tend to take more risks, according to many studies, which could be relevant, although whether that’s an innate or socialised difference is difficult to tell; more on that later.

Article here. Excerpt:

'“Right now, nearly 1 in 5 women in America has been a victim of rape or attempted rape,” President Obama said Sunday night in a message played during the Grammys. “And more than 1 in 4 women has experienced some form of domestic violence.”

Wow, just wow.

Gone are the days that the president makes false claims that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while in college. Now 20 percent of all women in America have been raped or nearly raped. And 25 percent of American women — not just college women — have experienced domestic violence.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A former Traverse City Area Public Schools student who was sexually assaulted by a teacher has filed a Title IX lawsuit against the district.

The federal lawsuit claims the teenage boy was harassed, ostracized and excluded by the district's "retaliatory treatment," which ultimately led him to drop out of high school.

The former Traverse City West Senior High School student was 15 years old when Lisa Gaye Placek, who was later convicted, sent him lewd text messages and performed oral sex on him in her car during the 2011-2012 school year.
...
She pleaded guilty to assault with intent to commit sexual penetration and was sentenced in March 2012 to 23 months to 10 years in prison. Michigan Department of Corrections records show she was paroled to Grand Traverse County in January 2014.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Cathy Young simply allows the accused man in this case, long since outed as Paul Nungesser, to tell the story from his own perspective, with Young verifying his facts—a novel approach to journalism, I know. The results look pretty bad. A university hearing already thoroughly examined the case using a relatively low standard, looking for a “preponderance of evidence” rather than seeking to establish Nungesser’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet they found Sulkowicz’s testimony not to be credible and cleared Nungesser of the charges. ...

The safe route for journalists is to say that maybe something really did happen and nobody can really know. But given that Nungesser was officially cleared by Columbia in a hearing that was pretty much primed to find him guilty, I think we’re entitled to say that Sulkowicz’s claim didn’t hold up.

The giveaway, really, is that she decided it would be “too draining” to pursue the case with the police—and then she literally carried a mattress around with her for more than a year and made a public spectacle of her victimhood. I suspect that the only burden she really feared was the burden of proof.
...
But you can see the standard at work here: the only people qualified to report on the issue of rape are those with the right ideological commitments who agree never to report the accused man’s side of the story. I can see why Sulkowicz might want to establish such a standard. I just can’t see why the rest of us would agree to go along with it.

Press release from SAVE:

WASHINGTON / February 10, 2015 – A leading domestic violence organization is criticizing President Obama for use of highly misleading claims on domestic violence. In a taped message to viewers of the Grammy awards Sunday night, President Obama called for an end to “violence against women and girls.” The President did not mention the problem of domestic violence against men and boys, even though males are equally likely to be victims of female-perpetrated abuse.

The problem of female-perpetrated violence has been documented in hundreds of studies. A research summary by Jennifer Langhinrichsen-Rohling, PhD of the University of South Alabama reported that females were more likely than males to be the perpetrators of unidirectional violence, by a two-to-one margin.

One compilation of 286 scholarly investigations concludes, “women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners:” http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm

SAVE has previously requested the Obama Administration to rely on accurate information in its domestic violence efforts: http://www.saveservices.org/camp/biased-briefing/biden-the-view/

Article here. Excerpt:

'Mattress-toting, alleged rape victim and performance artist Emma Sulkowicz is a feminist icon because progressive pundits have treated her rape accusation against Paul Nungesser as tantamount to a conviction. Daniel Garisto, former editorial page editor of the Columbia Spectator (the Spectator is one of Sulkowicz's biggest cheerleaders), has now admitted that the campus news media didn't cover Sulkowicz's story impartially, critically, or thoroughly: "Personally, I felt that if I covered the existence of a different perspective—say, that due process should be respected—not only would I have been excoriated, but many would have said that I was harming survivors and the fight against sexual assault," he wrote. ... Yesterday, the New York Post said Mr. Nungesser deserves an apology "from the media and the ­cabal of feminists ... who have supported his ­accuser unquestioningly."

Article here. Excerpt:

'What explains the nearly universal lack of confidence in these proceedings? Universities share some of the blame, but there’s another culprit too: the United States government. People often wonder why college administrators try to adjudicate these fiendishly difficult cases, rather than putting them in the hands of the criminal justice system.

The reason is that the Department of Education has very forcefully told schools to handle sexual grievances themselves and given them very detailed instructions about how to do so. A report last year from a White House task force on campus sexual assault underscored the importance to a university of following that advice. Even though the D.O.E.’s instructions are presented as recommendations rather than law, its Office for Civil Rights can put any school that fails to follow them on the list of colleges under investigation and even take away its federal funding.
...
What should universities do to convince the world that they’re fit to deal with campus rape? First, they should band together and demand that the government rethink its guidelines, especially those that flout the key tenets of due process. Second, they should ask the Office for Civil Rights to clarify its notion of sexual misconduct, now left to each school to define. Is it rape if a man fails to get affirmative consent at every stage of a sexual interaction, or only if he ignores a spoken objection? If a man and a woman are equally drunk, should he be found guilty of assaulting her because she was too intoxicated to agree to sex, even though he himself may have been too drunk to know that? (Right now, at most schools, he would be considered guilty.)
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'Ezra Klein: There are a couple parts of the book in drawing out the implications of those findings that are really depressing. When you read some of these studies, I think you might step back and say, "You know what, that's great. If men are overconfident fools, and women correctly have more humility about what we as fallible human beings know about the world, that's going to be a huge advantage for women."

Then you run the numbers, and you find that people projecting overconfidence in the workplace ends up being a huge advantage for them.'

---
The Illiberal Ezra Klein: '...in Klein’s words, that it will “create a world where men are afraid” enough of the authorities that they “feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.” All in all, Klein adduces, “The Yes Means Yes law could also be called the You Better Be Pretty Damn Sure law.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The public service announcement represents the latest installment in the White House's ongoing "It's On Us," campaign, which aims to end sexual assaults on college campuses. The administration began the effort in September, with the support of major college sports leagues and prominent celebrities.

Obama asked the artists featured at the Grammys to ask their fans to make the same pledge that these prominent figures have made, along with students from more than 200 colleges and universities, several collegiate sports organizations, and some private firms. He notes that nearly 1 in 5 women in the U.S. has experienced rape or attempted rape, and that more than 1 in 4 has suffered some form of domestic violence.'