🎉 🎂 Happy 44th birthday to Title IX! 🎂 🎉
Pop quiz! In which of the following areas does Title IX help ensure gender equity?
A. Fairness in school admissions
B. Access to athletics
C. Protection from sexual harassment and sexual assault
D. Opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)
E. All of the above
If you answered E, you are correct!
Many people think that Title IX exclusively addresses gender equity in school athletics, but the law has a much broader focus.
Signed into law on June 23, 1972, Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in any educational program or activity — public or private — when it comes to receiving federal funds.
The law applies to every aspect of educational activities from preschool through higher education, including admissions, recruitment, academics, employment, athletics, and student services.
Title IX is widely recognized for its role in the huge growth of women’s athletic programs, but imagine if we made as much progress inthe other aspects Title IX covers as we have with sports.
That women and girls still face discrimination on campus is why it’s so important to spread the word that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights recently released three sorely needed tools: a letter to schools reiterating the importance of Title IX coordinators, a thank-you letter directly to coordinators reaffirming their roles, and a free resource manual to guide their actions. Every school is required to appoint a Title IX coordinator to help prevent discrimination at her or his school, but before now the coordinators had few resources to do their jobs. And many schools haven’t appointed a coordinator at all.
The Office for Civil Rights has provided schools and Title IX coordinators with resources they need to independently act and address complaints, just in time for school to start. But we need you to help spread the word.
Why does it take three federal investigations for administrators to take one student’s sexual assault claims seriously?
This is really important. We’ve all seen hundreds of Drug PSAs… how many times have we seen this?
Well played. I did a genuine double take.
Yes, yes, yes. Also, check out Stop Street Harassment.
(via pangurbanthewhite)
Facebook, in response to the attention drawn to its failure to recognize and censor gender-based hate speech, issued a statement yesterday.
They wrote:
“In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want. In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria. We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards. We need to do better – and we will.”
There’s still a lot of contention over what should and shouldn’t be censored on Facebook, and we’ll see how the implementation goes, but this seems like a good first step.
Read more here.
A textbook example of how to respond to sexual harassment - if only the rest of us had security staff at our disposal.
…If only no one needed security staff at their disposal.
It’s not a crime that Vito Lopez harassed and molested employees and retaliated against them when they refused his sexual advances.
It’s not a crime that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver covered up Vito’s attacks and made secret payments to the accusers with taxpayer money to shut them up.
It’s not a crime that state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman closed his eyes to the hush-money payoff.
It’s not a crime that state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli signed off on the payments without raising a single objection.
Glad that’s cleared up.
Read more here.
Silence Isn’t Useful Against Street Harassment
from here.
When I was a freshman in college, I went to Woody’s, a gay bar in center city, with a few friends. At the end of the night, I went outside to get some air while waiting for my friends to meet me. It happened to be the same night of a big Phillies game – I don’t follow sports, so I can’t tell you which team they played against or even if they lost or won – and there were cars lined up on the street in a traffic jam, honking their horns and going wild. I also don’t understand Philly sport fans.
Next thing I knew, I was being pulled into the back of a truck where at least six grown men were screaming names at me, ripping at my dress and punching me to keep me down. I curled up as tight as I could, holding my head and hoping someone would help me.
Luckily, due to the congestion of cars, a stranger on the street was able to pull me out of the truck before they had the chance to drive away. I immediately went to the cops, reporting what happened and also explaining that they had taken my phone, but the cops said there was simply “nothing” they could do since I didn’t have a license plate number or any way to identify them.
I guess this experience kind of shaped my belief that as a woman, I would just have to put up with harassment from men. It made me believe that being catcalled on the street was no big deal. But as we accept it, we start to let bigger things happen. We start to lose a sense of power, and we give into society’s wrongs rather than joining together and letting people know that no, it’s not OK.
Stuff we read about women
Lego makes tiny little harassing construction workers.
Bare Minerals makes a terrible mistake at a half-marathon in DC; follows up with an good apology.
Does the media focus only on white sexual assault survivors?
Five awesome women get gender studies onto the Ontario curriculum (it took 8 years).
Mitt Romney references the Quiver Full movement in a commencement address. Kathryn Joyce responds.
Congrats, Jason Collins. But why does the media shrug when female athletes come out?
For your weekend: Janelle Monae and Erykah Badu are awesome.
Circle of 6 is an app designed to help young women quickly contact their friend group in potentially dangerous situations. It has everything from a “bad date” button (“Call me, I need an interruption”) to a notice that you need to be picked up with a GPS ping of your location.
Rape myths often suggest that women ask for rape because of how they dress or behave and contribute to a rape culture that accepts sexual violence and victim-blaming.
The ultimate consequences of sexual violence and victim-blaming are shocking – and all too common.
Today reflects the silence many in the LGBTQ community are forced into due to bullying and sexual harassment.
Almost half of students grade 7-12 reported experiencing sexual harassment in 2010. Only half of those students spoke about it with parents, teachers or friends. Sexual harassment is prevalent in schools, especially against LGBTQ students, and detrimental to education.
“Why don’t you show us what’s underneath that towel, baby?”
I heard this shouted from a car of four young men, no older than 19, hanging out the window, being obnoxious. I had been walking home alone one summer afternoon after swim practice in my suburban neighborhood and immediately looked around to see if anyone else was walking near me when I realized I was alone, ashamed, and powerless. I’d like to think if I had been older, I would have been less afraid or maybe even shouted something back.
But I was 13, relatively quiet, and awkwardly uncomfortable in most settings, let alone one I had just been harassed in. Back then, I never realized there was a term for what I had experienced (street harassment) nor that there was an impending movement to educate about it and eradicate it.