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Grassroots stories, action items, state and national politics, and the odd bit of feminist philosophizin' from the women of Texas NOW. Every issue is a woman's issue - we talk about why and how.

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April 21, 2006

Just in time for Equal Pay Day...

... two women here in Texas actually got retroactive pay equity. It's not perfect. They didn't get tenure. And I have to believe that this lawsuit will compromise their future hireability - academia isn't that big a world, people do talk, and boy, do universities not like to get sued. But good for them for standing up for themselves and getting what they deserved.

I do find it interesting that the university had no comment. And that a search of the archives of the campus newspaper showed that the last article on this lawsuit appeared in 2004. Hmmm. What's that I hear? Why, I do believe that's grouchy patriarchal silence, and it's coming from Lubbock! So let's see if Texas Tech will change their policies so that women get paid what they deserve in the first place. Any alumni out there? Y'all drop the university president a line and ask him, why don't you? If you're the parent of a current student, do drop them a line and let them know it's important to you that your daughters to see that the university to which you send so much money does value women's work equally.

March 24, 2006

The real costs of the Mommy Track

Equal Pay Day is coming up, so women's economic status is on my mind. We all know there's a wage gap and a glass ceiling. But Joshua Holland at AlterNet has done a great job of laying out less familiar ways that US women get shafted economically.

The real problem facing working women in the U.S. is that we have the most inflexible workplaces in the developed world.

According to Harvard's Project on Global Working Families, the United States is one of only five countries out of 168 studied that doesn't mandate some form of paid maternal leave. The only other advanced economy among those five was Australia's, where women are guaranteed an entire year of unpaid leave. That puts the U.S. -- the wealthiest nation on the planet -- in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland...


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