Article here. Excerpt:

'Malmö start-up Brisk.io, which creates tools for sales organizations, recently advertised two positions within their company. The firm has been on the lookout for a blogger/marketing position and an outbound sales junior role, and stated in the job listings that they had a preference for female candidates.

"The position is in Malmö (Sweden) and you are fluent in English and are proficient with the technical tools. Preferably you are a woman. Yes, we are biased to hiring women for all positions," stated the advert.

At present, Brisk.io employs one woman in its 10-strong workforce. Co-founder and CEO Hampus Jakobsson told The Local that the lack of females in the office had been the motivation for the biased job posting.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Business Secretary Vince Cable has backed recommendations which could see headhunters draft women-only shortlists for board-level posts, eliminating men entirely from the recruitment process.

All-women shortlists are not currently used in the private sector because they are fraught with legal difficulties and leave companies open to sex discrimination claims from men left out of the hiring process.

But Mr Cable has asked the UK’s equality body, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, to create guidance for headhunters on when and how women-only shortlists could be used in accordance with the law, free from the threat of litigation.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Psychological abuse should be made a crime in England and Wales in order to save more victims of domestic violence, campaigners have said.

The groups, including Women's Aid, say current legislation focuses too much on specific incidents, such as an assault.

They say the law fails to take into account power and control, which are the essence of domestic abuse.

The Home Office said it would carefully consider the idea after a police review of domestic abuse was completed.

Women's Aid, the Sara Charlton Charitable Foundation and stalking advice service Paladin have urged the government to criminalise "coercive control", patterns of abusive behaviour and causing psychological harm, in order to make it easier to prove long-running abuse.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey found that each year, nearly identical percentages of men and women experience sexual violence other than rape (men: 5.3%; women: 5.6%). And rapes have plummeted to their lowest levels in decades—see graph on the right. Still, campus extremists insist our society is permeated with what they call “rape-culture.”

Their solution? Affirmative Consent, which the U.S. Department of Education describes as persons’ “affirmative, unambiguous, and voluntary agreement” for any sexual encounter.

Article here. Rightfully, we read this article, and think it's incomprehensible, especially as it says the girls who had it done to them think it was good for them. Sound familiar? Switch the genders and most people in western countries would be "meh..." about it. Religion's no excuse when it comes to FGM, right? So why is it when it comes to MGM? Excerpt:

'The 30 Somali teenagers - both boys and girls - all agreed: Female genital mutilation is harmful and the practice should be abandoned. But what they really meant, they revealed moments later, is that girls should have their genitalia cut - just not sewn shut.

"It's our tradition and if the girls are not subjected to suna(cutting) she will not be accepted for marriage," said Asthma Ibrahim Jabril, 17.

The students, who are part of an afterschool club in Somaliland which the U.N. children's agency helps fund, discuss issues like child labor, early marriage, and female genital mutilation in a classroom with several large hearts scrawled along the walls.
...
All 15 girls sitting opposite the boys at Sheik Nuur Primary school have undergone suna_the removal of the clitoris and the labia minora. They all said it was the right thing to do.

Female genital mutilation comes in many different forms. The other form known by the Somali teens is sewing the vagina shut until marriage. Everyone agreed that this should be ended.
...
Female genital mutilation can cause severe bleeding and problems with urination, cysts, infections, infertility and complications with childbirth, including an increased risk of newborn death. More than 125 million girls and women alive today have been cut in 29 African and Middle Eastern countries, the World Health Organization says.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Fraternities offer their members opportunities for community service, friendship, and leadership. They also create environments that seem to breed hazing, binge drinking, and sexual assault. Universities have struggled to harness fraternities’ power for good and diminish their capability for evil, but so far little has worked. So what can universities do to stem the flow of fatalities, injuries, and sexual assaults at fraternities? Instead of threatening fraternities with everything from limited rush week activities to double secret probation, some think the solution is to end the reign of fraternities on American campuses altogether. Last month, Bloomberg’s editors called for college administrations to abolish fraternities. Caitlin Flanagan called for the “shuttering” of fraternities in a 2011 Wall Street Journal piece. Other writers have penned similar pieces.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A central Ohio principal says she suspended a 10-year-old boy from school for three days for pretending his finger was a gun and pointing it at another student's head.

The boy's father says it's the adults who are acting childish for suspending the boy from Devonshire Alternative Elementary School in Columbus last week.

The fifth-grader said he was "just playing around." But district spokesman Jeff Warner told The Columbus Dispatch ( HTTP://BIT.LY/1JO1RL7* ) that Devonshire Principal Patricia Price has warned students about pretend gun play numerous times this year, and everyone should know the rules by now. He said warnings have been included in three newsletters sent home with kids.

Warner says the boy put his finger to the side of the other student's head and pretended to shoot "kind of execution style."

Article here. Excerpt:

Link here. Excerpt:

Link here. Excerpt:

'Two decades after the passage of a landmark law mandating that women be represented in government-funded medical research, a new report reveals that the world of science is still ignoring women's unique health issues far more than it should.
...
While women are now more routinely included in clinical trials and an entire field of women's health has emerged beyond reproductive health, "there are still enormous gaps in the scientific process as it relates to women," said Johnson, who is executive director of The Connors Center for Women's Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
...
However, Gordon said, a lot of researchers don't want to do studies on women of childbearing age due to their monthly hormonal fluctuations, for example.

"When you're doing animal studies, you want to make things as standardized as possible," she explained. "If you add in gender, how do you standardize, especially considering the hormone issues," but that doesn't excuse the disparity, Gordon noted.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A shocking illustration of unintended consequences -- the long-term analysis of 1200 domestic violence cases in Milwaukee marks the greatest challenge yet to the “mandatory arrest” policies that were adopted across North America and Britain in the 1980s. Those policies, for domestic assault without serious injury, came after years of police minimizing domestic violence as a private family matter, and are broadly supported as key to reducing harm.
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Based on an experiment in Milwaukee, it shows a four-fold increase in early death for victims who were employed at the time of the violence, with an even stronger effect among African-Americans. The findings are to be presented jointly in the U.S. and at a policing conference in the U.K.

Article here. Or perhaps it is equally due to older mothers - or the increased incidence of diagnosing psychiatric illnesses. Excerpt:

'Children born to fathers over the age of 45 are at greater risk of developing psychiatric problems and more likely to struggle at school, according to the findings of a large-scale study.

The research found that children with older fathers were more often diagnosed with disorders such as autism, psychosis, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They also reported more drug abuse and suicide attempts.

"We were shocked when we saw the comparisons," said Brian D'Onofrio, the first author of the study at Indiana University in the US. But he added that it was impossible to be sure that older age was to blame for the problems.

Researchers at Indiana University and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm studied medical and educational records of more than 2.6 million babies born to 1.4 million men. The group amounted to nearly 90% of births in Sweden from 1973 and 2001.
...
Ryan Edwards, who studies the economics of health and ageing at the City University of New York, said the study revealed "some evidence that paternal age may worsen children's psychiatric, behavioral and educational outcomes."

But he warned that the results hinged on the scientists' comparisons between siblings. "In that setting, it is difficult to separate the overlapping effects of paternal age, children's age, and birth order in a convincing way," he said.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Girls are better than boys -- in literacy, at least. And the gender gap keeps getting wider.

Males have been doing worse compared to their female classmates when taking the Grade 10 Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) during the last five years -- from 6.6% below the girls in 2009 to 9% last year, according to this year's Fraser Institute Secondary School Report Card.

"That's a fair increase -- almost 50% increase from where it was before," said the Fraser Institute's Peter Cowley.

Meanwhile, the Grade 9 math gender gap favoured boys at 45% of schools across the province. The sexes performed evenly at 32.4% of schools.
...
Education research analyst Terri Thompson said girls seem to be doing better in all academic areas except math. The reading gap between boys and girls has been a long-standing issue for the past few decades.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The fact is that “rape culture” is a form of popular mania like so many others before it. It does not exist. Or if it does, nobody has yet brought forward evidence of it. What we have seen is ideology attached to a great deal of personal narrative regarding unwanted or regretted sex. Some of those narratives have been compelling, but unsupported by evidence. Some have been compelling and found to be false allegations. Many of the narratives are based in recollection hazed over by alcoholic smog. And most of them would not stand up for two minutes in a criminal court of law.

Many observers have become more, not less skeptical with the mounting hysteria. One such observer has done something useful to validate our skepticism. Chad Hermann, a writer and management communication professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, has published an article in communityvoices.post-gazette.com assessing both the claims and the actual statistical evidence for rape culture, in which he illuminates some glaring contradictions.

Hermann set the typical projected figure of 20-25% of women as victims of forced sex against the reported sexual assault offenses over three years at Pittsburgh’s three largest residential universities: the University of Pittsburgh (UP), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Duquesne University (DU). In 2009: At UP, with 14,800 female students, four sexual assaults were reported. At CMU, with about 3,900 female students, six sexual assaults were reported (a three-year high). At DU, with 5,700 females, three were reported.

Link here. Excerpt:

'Special considerations have to be made to address modesty concerns so that the Muslim girls can swim and not reveal too much of themselves.

During the hourlong swim practice, all other swimmers are cleared out of the pool. The men’s locker room is locked. Female life guards are brought in. The pool, which is on the building’s third floor, has no windows so they don’t have to worry about prying eyes from outside.

St. Paul Police Chief Tom Smith had discussions with Britts to let the Y know that, through the department’s connections with the Somali-American community, they had learned that such a group was needed.
...
“We have to have privacy,” said Ubah Ali, Dhamuke’s mother.

For years, Ali said she has been trying to find a place where her daughter could swim, but nothing seemed to work. Not knowing how to swim is a safety risk, especially in the state of 10,000 lakes, Ali said.