Toilets Before Marriage

An article I discovered online, posted by the Washington Post, caught my attention rather quickly. In Nilokheri, India women are refusing to marry unless their husband-to-be has furnished their soon to be home with a bathroom. This way, women are free of embarrassment. They would otherwise have to squat in fields or any other place they could find outside, and if they are lucky,community toilets. It is known that about 665 million people in India, which happens to be just around half of the population, do not have access to toilets. A campaign that started to get more toilets installed called "No Toilet, No Bride" has been very successful. The campaign, which started about two tears ago, has helped more than 1.4 million toilets be built in northern state of Haryana. Some of them built with government funds, according to the state's health department. Women's rights activists call the campaign a revolution as it spreads across the country in hundreds on rural towns.

Indian girls are traditionally seen as a financial liabilities because of the wedding dowries, which is often times one's life's savings of their fathers. The money, property, land or goods are often given to the groom's family. But that is slowly changing as women marry later and grow more financially self-reliant. More rural girls are enrolled in school than ever before.

Men in the villages and towns are taking the women seriously. They know that they will never find a bride if they do not make something of themselves in order to afford a toilet. India;s rapid urbanization has encourages many of these thoughts and actions.

Survey Shows that Women in the Workforce See Their Physical Appearance as Very Important

Reading through articles, I came across one that talked about how women themselves took a survey asking them if they thought their appearance was important to their job. The survey was conducted among female professionals, senior managers and business owners of PINK Magazine, a publication for career women, and Corset Personal Styling, a personal shopping company for women.

The results showed that nearly all U.S. working women believe that their professional appearance is crucial to success at work. One in five of these female executives say, according to the survey, that they have withheld a promotion or a raise due to the way an employee dresses Wulfhorst, 1). Only 2% of the women polled believed that they way they dress or have dressed in the past, has affected their careers in some way (Wulfhorst, 1). Fifty-five percent of these women said that they feel that they do not have anything to wear that would be appropriate so they wear the same things over and over again. Others say that they continue to buy things that look similar to things that they already have. Almost half of the women said that they feel they wear too much black.

I feel as though the survey that was given to these women shows what women really do feel about they way they dress in the workplace. Appearance is important, but it should not be everything. Someone should be picked to have a raise or be promoted because of the skills or knowledge they have. Believe it or not, it is discrimination when someone is picked for a job because of the way they are dressed rather than because they are qualified. There could be someone else who is a lot more qualified for the job than they are even though they may not have "good fashion sense."

Wulfhorst, Ellen. "U.S. working women see appearance as key: survey." Www.reuters.com. Ed. Michelle Nichols and Xavier Briand. Thompson Reuters Corporate, 14 Oct. 2009. Web. 23 Oct. 2009. .

Reflection

With all of the research that I have been doing to prepare and write my papers I have thought a lot about my topic, my opinion about what I have been talking about and discussing and other people's views on the subject. My most recent paper discusses how and why women are underpaid in the field that they work in. Because women are paid significantly less than their male counter parts, women's families suffer because their pay check is too low to support an entire family. My paper discusses and addresses other people's opinions on why women get paid less than men and attempt to explain their reasons. They try to prove that women work less hours, take longer leaves of absence, and may not get the job done. This is completely someones opinion and should no be considered facts at all. These opinions are simply excuses.

Because I am a working woman who holds a job where there are other workers who are men, I am interested in this topic and have my own opinion. I believe that if a woman was hired to so the same job as a man, then that woman should be paid equally. Discrimination against either sex is wrong especially when it comes to the wages of men and women in the work force.

Women's Rights in Ancient Egypt

From an article that I had found online about ancient Egyptian women, I learned more than I had thought I would. In my past journals, I have been researching and commenting on different types of women's rights. I have talked about women in Afghanistan and how they have been treated for quite some time, but the article that I found seemed very empowering towards women. In ancient Egypt, women’s rights reached a level that has rarely been seen in the modern world. This was unusual in the ancient world and many neighbouring states looked down upon them for this. Rather than being seen as the weaker sex, women were often portrayed as being just as capable of violence and power as men. Queens were shown executing their enemies, torturing prisoners and slinging arrows at male opponents in battle. Even non-royal women have been shown stabbing male enemy soldiers. The women went to the market and took part in trading while the men were depicted as sitting at home weaving. This seems extremely strange to me and I'm sure many others.
In recent blogs posts, I have talked about how women have been mistreated, looked down upon and or given no rights. This article grabbed my attention because it discussed the complete opposite. It was refreshing and enlightening to read an article where the women discussed were powerful and in control.

The Mexican Workplace: How Women are Taking a Stand

I have recently read an interesting article about the working women of Mexico. The article described how women are treated in the work place on a day to day basis. It said that in a survey taken in 2005 by the First National Survey on Discrimination, 93% women expressed that they have been a victim of discrimination. In the past few years, as increased globalization and trade has occured, women in particular have been relocated from the agriculture scene of work and into maquiladoras. These are factories typically located along the U.S. border where goods are assembled or finished for exportation. Women working in maquiladoras are subjected to sexual harassment by coworkers and supervisors, required to undergo pregnancy testing when applying for work, and forced to endure further pregnancy discrimination after they have been hired.

Mexican legislation does guarantee some rights to women, such as equal protection under the law and the right to work. Mexican women workers can and should demand protection for their human rights under international and regional human rights law. Unfortunatly, the legislation will not pass any law, code or restriction saying it is wrong. Many groups that are helping to enforce a law against discrimination include the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women ("CEDAW"), the American Charter on Human Rights, and the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation ("NAALC"), and the North American Free Trade Agreement ("NAFTA"). All of these groups include provisions regarding gendered labor discrimination.

Women in Mexico are now working with the Mexican government inorder to fulfill its obligation under human rights law to protect women from discrimination in the workplace. It is a work in progress, but much headway has been made.

Are men really jerks?

Lately I have been reading a lot of articles lately that had to do with women's rights and how many people view them. I found a particular article titled, So Men Really Are Jerks? Study Shows That Men Really Do View Women as Objects. Susan Fiske, a Princeton University psychologist, has assumed for quite some time now, that women in bikinis and other revealing attire tend to be viewed by men as objects. Most men will admit that seeing a woman in a bikini or revealing attire can have a temporary tranquil effect on the male heterosexual brain. Thanks the MRI scanner, a Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scan, Dr. Fiske has managed to actually prove this theory.

Dr. Fiske showed photos of women in bathing suits and women wearing rather revealing clothing, along with control photos of fully-dressed men and women and men that were dresses revealingly to 21 heterosexual males apart of the test. This was happening while they underwent MRI scans. Fiske found that the premotor cortex, the region of the brain we use when manipulating tools, lit up like CRAZY when the photos of the partially dressed women were shown to the male participants.

What was even more disturbing, was the fact that Dr. Fiske found that the region of the brain responsible for social cognition failed to activate. Social cognition is the process by which we evaluate the feelings and intentions of others. It is also the study of how people process social information, especially its encoding, storage, retrieval, and application to social situations.

Without any activity in this area, the men were effectively looking at objects (one they wanted to manipulate like a tool) rather than another person when viewing the photos of partially dressed women (Clark 1). Seeming as tough Fiske's findings could not make men in general look any worse, when they were given a memory test of the photos they had just been exposed to in the MRI, the majority of the men remembered the photos of headless women in bikinis the best.

These findings should not be surprising to any woman at all. Men view women as objects on a daily basis. I see it everywhere I go. If there happen to be two women walking next to eachother down the road, one is "prettier" than the other, men's attention is drawn to them immediately. This shows that they are thinking with something other than their brains.

I am very interested in more studies like this one and will continue to do more research on this topic.

Clark, Josh. "So men really are jerks? Study shows men really do view women as objects." How Stuff Work. Word Press VIP, 23 Feb. 2009. Web. 25 Sept. 2009. http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2009/02/23/so-men-really-are-jerks/.

Women cultivate, plough and harvest more than half of all the food in the world

Today I read an article that is titled "Women cultivate, plough,and harvest more than half of the food in the world." This title stood out as I was browsing and I just had to read it. All of the information that I found was according to the Inter Press Service. In countries such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, the women there produce more than 80% of all the food an food products used there. In the food production category, they are actually producing more than 50% of all the food. As well as cultivating, ploughing, harvesting and producing the women in those countries are also raising the live stock that are to be used for food and food processing. These women are severely underpaid and receive no recognition for the work that they do so that everyone can have food. The women are running out of money for supplies and tools that are needed to do the jobs that they do because they are paid so little. Compared to the men, in any country, women are usually getting paid less because the work they are doing is considered "low-status."
I have always wondered why women were always paid significantly less than men. In doing some research , I have found that that is not always the case. For example, women in Brazil, who are under the age of 25, earn a higher hourly wage than the men who do the same jobs. This was the only example that I could really find that was as general as it is.
Many people do not recognize the work that women do everyday and never get paid for. In most cases, women are running the household. Some of the duties that this job entails includes food shopping, cleaning the kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms and common rooms, restocking food shelves and supplies, driving children to and from school, preparing breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner, and childcare in general. All of these jobs are jobs that people get paid to do outside of the home. Women who run a household have all of these duties on their shoulders, a lot of the time with no help. The job of being a mother, wife and house keeper takes of most of a woman's working hours. What i don't understand is why women, who run the household have less power over the household earnings...?