Gender Studies

A persistent problem. Traditional gender roles hold back female scientists
Source: EMBO Reports (Nature)
From press release (National Institutes of Health):

Women scientists are not pursuing advanced research careers because of a heavier burden of family responsibility and lower confidence compared to men, according to a study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of its own research staff appearing in the November 2007 issue of the EMBO Reports, part of the Nature family of publications.

Although women comprise nearly half of all undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral scientists nationwide, after committing 10 to 15 years to scientific training, many leave academic research during the career transition to faculty or tenured positions. For example, at the NIH, only 29 percent of the tenure-track principal investigators (PI) and 19 percent of tenured PIs — the NIH equivalent of assistant and full professors, respectively — are women. These figures have hardly changed over the last decade and mirror the disparities at most academic research institutions.

See also: Falling off the academic bandwagon. Women are more likely to quit at the postdoc to principal investigator transition

Asian Son Preference Will Have Severe Social Consequences, New Studies Warn
Source: United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

Prenatal son selection in several Asian countries is likely to have severe social consequences in coming years, according to a new series of studies commissioned by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund.

Life could become harder for many girls and women outnumbered by males, as pressures to conform and comply increase. A growing number of men will be unable to find wives, which may lead to a rise in sexual violence and trafficking of women.

India and China, with the most dramatic imbalance between births of boys and girls, are stepping up efforts to address the issue. But authors of the reports say more concerted measures to promote gender equality are urgently needed.

+ Sex-Ratio Imbalance in Asia: Trends, Consequences and Policy Responses

• Executive Summary of Regional Analysis (PDF; 275 KB)
• Full Regional Analysis (PDF; 93 KB)

Individual country reports available for China, India, Nepal, and Viet Nam (PDFs).

Accommodating the Female Body
Source: Social Science Research Network

This essay presents a novel approach to understanding sex discrimination in the workplace by integrating three distinct areas of scholarship: disability studies, labor law, and architectural design. Borrowing from disabilities studies, I argue that the built environment serves as a situs of sex discrimination. In the first section, I explain how the concept of disability has progressed from a problem located within the body of an individual with a disability to the failings of the built environment in which that person functions. Using this paradigm, in the next section, I reframe workplaces constructed for male workers as instruments of sex discrimination. I then explain how built environments intended for the male body constitute disparate impact under Title VII. In the final section, I present the architectural school of universal design, which has been a source of crucial innovation in the disability labor rights framework, as a means for both de-abling and de-sexing the workplace.