Article here. Excerpt:

'Here’s a radical notion: It is simultaneously possible to believe that women are entitled to equal pay and to not support the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Not that you’d know it from the rhetoric President Obama and fellow Democrat are happily flinging at Republicans who dare to oppose the measure.

“I don’t know why you would resist the idea that women should be paid the same as men and then deny that that’s not always happening out there,” Obama said Tuesday. “If Republicans in Congress… want to show that they do care about women being paid the same as men, then show me…They can join us, in this, the 21st century and vote yes on the Paycheck Fairness Act.”
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Before you start checking the byline at the top of this piece and emailing the editor that there’s been a terrible mistake, let me be clear: I support ensuring that women receive equal pay for equal work — I have a bit of a vested stake in that issue myself. Unequal pay remains a problem, although not at the women-earn-77-cents-on-the-dollar level of Democrats’ sloganeering. Most relevantly, I’d vote for the Paycheck Fairness Act in the unlikely event that someone elected me to Congress.

http://www.work-equality.org/

'According to the latest statistics from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), men in the United States worked for pay for an average of 308 minutes per day in 2013, as compared with 242 minutes per day for women. That's the equivalent of 1,874 hours per year for men versus 1,472 hours for women. Based on these numbers, Equal Work Day will fall on April 10, 2014 in the US. Similar results can be found in Canada and many other nations.

Certainly this is not the complete story. These same statistics show that women spend more time on unpaid work*, reporting that they do more housework and spend more time on childcare than men do. There will be plenty of women viewing this page who work 50, 60 hours a week or more, as well as men who work fewer hours than their partners.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) wants us to know she's mad - angry, outraged, even - that her Senate colleagues didn't pass her Paycheck Fairness Act today. The bill failed to gain cloture by a vote of 53 to 44.

"I'll tell you what I'm tired of hearing," she yelled, "that somehow or other we're too emotional when we talk."
...
"You know what I'm tired of hearing? That somehow or other we're too emotional when we talk. Well I am emotional. I am so emotional about this. I tell you that if we don't pass this bill, I'm gonna press on. It bring tears to my eyes, to know how women are working so hard and are getting paid less. It makes me emotional to hear that. Then when I hear all of these phony reasons, some are mean and some are meaningless. I do get emotional.

"I get angry. I get outraged. I get volcanic."

Story here.

'A Shanghai woman, angry with her husband following a quarrel, took out her frustration on her son, chopping off three of his left hand fingers. The incident happened on Wednesday, when the couple began quarreling over some family issues, police said yesterday. The wife got angry and pulled her 8-year-old son over, cutting off three of his fingers with a kitchen knife. The boy was rushed to hospital while the woman has been detained by police.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'This is the shocking punishment dished out to a six-year-old boy by his mother - for not doing his homework.

Whipped with a wire coat-hanger ’s [sic] injuries were so brutal his own nursery teacher reported his mother to police.

However, police in China decided the scars left on the schoolboy’s thighs should not result in his mother being charged because they were “not so bad as they look”.

The teacher at the school in southern China’s Jiangmen city in southern Guandong province spotted the whiplash injuries as the youngster changed for a sports lesson.
...
But police sent to investigate ruled the injuries - sustained as the boy was steel-chained to his bed to stop him running out to play - looked worse than they were.

Story here. Excerpt:

'The second child a Pittsburgh woman allegedly drowned because "crazy voices" led her to kill her children has died.

Daniel Schlemmer, 6, was confirmed dead Saturday - just four days after he and his younger brother Luke, 3, were drowned in a hot tub near Pittsburgh by their 40-year-old mother Laurel Michelle Schlemmer, the Allegheny County Medical Examiner's Office said.

Daniel had been brain dead since Tuesday before succumbing to the horrific action of his mother. He had been on life support at a Pittsburgh hospital.

Laurel told police "crazy voices" told her to drown her children in a bathtub Tuesday after her third son left for school at her McCandless Pa. home.
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She called 911 but gave the dispatcher several different versions of events of what happened.

She first said she found her sons unconscious after they had been playing in the bathtub, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'“Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns…in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.”

–President Obama, remarks on equal pay for equal work, April 8, 2014

In 2012, during another election season, The Fact Checker took a deep dive in the statistics behind this factoid and found it wanting. We awarded the president only a Pinoochio, largely because he is citing Census Bureau data, but have wondered since then if we were too generous.

We also called out the president when he used this fact in the 2013 State of the Union address. And in the 2014 State of the Union address. And yet he keeps using it. So now it’s time for a reassessment.
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Few experts dispute that there is a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women — such as women tending to leave the workforce when they have children — make it difficult to make simple comparisons.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Men commit more violent crime than women, by a mile. Around 85-90% of convicted murderers are men, a majority of the reported domestic abusers and pretty much all of those committing sexual attacks. However – and this is the part that gets overlooked – almost twice as many men than women are the victims of violence. While as a society we rightly give lots of attention to protecting women against violence, from warnings about predatory cab drivers to reports on women’s refuges, from the understanding that it’s wrong to hit a woman to walking women home, very little seems to be being done to protect men, or to dissuade anyone from the idea that it’s also wrong to hit a man. Is male life cheaper?

In discussions of domestic violence, it is often noted with alarm that women are killed at a rate of two per week, by usually male partners or ex-partners. But domestic violence is not exclusively male on female: the ONS statistics for 2011-12 show that while 1.2 million women experienced domestic violence, so too did 800,000 men. A 1994 University of Iowa paper by veteran criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz reported that over 40% of US spousal murders are perpetrated by women (as I write this, police have arrested the ex-girlfriend of British milionaire Andrew Bush, whose body was discovered at his Spanish villa earlier this month).
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Outside the home, your chances of being attacked or killed are much higher if you’re a man. Men make up over two-thirds of murder victims, 68%. Therefore, of the 540 currently known UK murder victims from 2011/12, whether inside or without the house, 367 were male, and 173 were female. This means that the UK murder rate of men is more than one per day.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'If that’s not enough, there is the phony war on women based on misleading statistics, which ignore that the infamous “77 cents on the dollar” claim about women’s wage gap is not the result of a “war on women.” Kessler explained (“Weekly wages is more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but as mentioned, it does not include as many income categories, The gap is even smaller when you look at hourly wages — it is 86 cents vs. 100 . . . but then not every wage earner is paid on an hourly basis, so that statistic excludes salaried workers. But, under this metric for people with a college degree, there is virtually no pay gap at all.”)

Article here. Excerpt:

'On Tuesday's CBS This Morning, White House correspondent Major Garrett completely dismantled President Obama's left-wing talking points on the supposed gender pay gap of women making 77 cents on the dollar compared to men, reporting: "The White House is getting...roughed up by hits own pay equity rhetoric." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Article here. Excerpt:

'Dueling petitions involving a pro-life teen and a professor charged with attacking her are circulating at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the student body is backing the teacher.

Students at the University of California at Santa Barbara are circulating the petitions, one in support of feminism Prof. Mireille Miller-Young, and another backing Thrin Short, the 16-year-old pro-lifer whose March 4 demonstration was allegedly broken up by Miller-Young. The one backing the professor, who has been charged with battery and vandalism, has more than 2,000 signatures, while the one in support of Short has 150, according to The College Fix.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week. Once that is taken into consideration, the pay gap begins to shrink. Women who worked a 40-hour week earned 88% of male earnings. Then there is the issue of marriage and children. The BLS reports that single women who have never married earned 96% of men’s earnings in 2012….

Education also matters. Even within groups with the same educational attainment, women often choose fields of study, such as sociology, liberal arts or psychology, that pay less in the labor market…

Risk is another factor. Nearly all the most dangerous occupations, such as loggers or iron workers, are majority male and 92% of work-related deaths in 2012 were to men…. Also: Males are more likely to pursue occupations where compensation is risky from year to year, such as law and finance. Research shows that average pay in such jobs is higher to compensate for that risk.'

Also see:

Article here. Excerpt:

'Tuesday is "Equal Pay Day." Meaning that it's time again to unleash the hounds to flush out all those misogynists who are keeping women in chains.

Women's paychecks don't equal men's because a vast male cabal is populating human relations departments across the land making sure that women's paychecks always and everywhere are smaller.

At least that's the idea that you might get from everyone who rolls out, as they will today, the oft-repeated canard that women "are paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men."

Article here. Excerpt:

'Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary, said the statistics for White House staff members reflect the fact that women fill more lower-level positions than men. But he said that women and men in the same positions at the White House are paid the same, and that many of the women hold senior positions.

“Men and women in equivalent roles here earn equivalent salaries,” Mr. Carney said. “Some of the most senior positions in the White House are filled by women, including national security adviser, homeland security adviser, White House counsel, communications director, senior adviser, deputy chief of staff.”

He said that the 88-cent statistic was misleading because it aggregates the salaries of White House staff members at all levels, including the lowest levels, where women outnumber men.'

Link here. Excerpt:

'Although sexual harassment is damaging for both men and women in the military, new research finds that military men have more trouble coping with it.

Men who experience threatening sexual harassment might become more distressed and have more problems with work performance than women subjected to similar treatment, according to the study, which was published online in the March issue of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.

"The surprise was that men were more upset and debilitated after experiencing frightening sexual harassment than women," study lead author Isis Settles, of Michigan State University, said in a journal news release.

"Men may be less likely to think they'll be sexually harassed, so it's a particularly strong violation of their expectations and that could result in stronger negative reactions," Settles said. "Another possibility is that men feel less able to cope with their sexual harassment than women, who know it's a possibility and therefore are perhaps more emotionally prepared."'