The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[Undertoad]

The campaign was launched on October 2. At some point in October it was cancelled. That video was down before Google's cache of the page on December 1. So.

search Google News for "Hack a hair dryer". You get thousands of outrage take results.

Use Google's search tools to restrict your search to October.

This is the period during when the campaign was launched, and the outrage machine is not visible. There are no criticisms of the campaign. The first search result is a Vimeo page of - I did a little digging - the Art Director for the Hack A Hair Dryer campaign! The video is gone, but the cached search result includes the tag:

"The concept: take a hairdryer – something typically viewed for beautifying purposes – and make it gender-neutral..."

Here is the idea that made it through corporate. The original campaign actually INCLUDED the outrage take!

The first result not from IBM is a reaction to the campaign from the blog: "Tech Savvy Women". Their blog entry is still live and so you can see how women in tech reacted, when the outrage take hadn't launched:

One of the ways we will increase the number of women in STEM fields is to break through traditional thinking and consider a different perspective. A program that is embracing this idea is the Hack a Hair Dryer campaign. The idea is to take something feminine that is used on a regular basis and transform it to serve a different purpose.

It would appear that the outrage engine geared up on December 7. (That's when it arrived here.) And the BBC story HM linked to points that out:

After running for a couple of months more or less unnoticed online, IBM's "hack a hairdryer" campaign suddenly attracted a barrage of criticism by Twitter users who called it patronising and sexist

The campaign's take "make it gender-neutral" was nuanced, a little complex. That's why an appealing, simpler take could outweigh it. Original campaign: 3,633 views. Outrage engine: tens of thousands of news stories. Each story designed to tweak your outrage, and attract your attention, clicks, and shares.

But eventually we will not need the original campaign.

[Undertoad]

And one more thing... I'm actually sorry for getting geared up over this, it's just that I find it to be utterly fascinating!

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

And one more thing... I'm actually sorry for getting geared up over this, it's just that I find it to be utterly fascinating!

It is fascinating. I didn't think you were getting 'geared up' it just seemed like robust debate to me. I've really enjoyed the discussion - it's been some nice back and forth, and I learned a lot from it.

[Happy Monkey]

Dilbert creator's Scott Adams's words inserted into his comic:

http://mradilbert.tumblr.com/

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yes, I like those.

[xoxoxoBruce]

We've seen a number of girls shooting teams from colleges and high schools, but they are cheap to setup, a gun, target, and sturdy backstop. This flying club however is a much bigger commitment, those J-17 trainers can't be cheap to buy or operate. They might be from the Federal Government but this was two months before D-Day, when the war was hardly a given, and all materiel was part of the war effort, with no surplus yet. I suppose the Army Air Corps might have been training in this room and the club got time after hours.

[Sundae]

From here (BBC link) which is an article about a new film called Love You to Death by Vanessa Engle, detailing stories of women killed by partners in 2013.

In 2013, 164 women were murdered in Britain - 86 of whom (52%) were killed by their male partner or ex-partner. In that same year, 381 men were murdered in Britain, 12 of whom (3%) were killed by a female partner or ex-partner.

At least they were dealt with seriously by the Courts. There was a time when Judges routinely meted out lighter sentences for domestic murder, citing provocation.

[DanaC]

Yeah, I read an article about that. Very interesting.

This caught my attention today:

One of Britain’s biggest exam boards has changed its A-level music syllabus to include female composers after a student launched an online campaign calling for better female representation on the course.

Jessy McCabe, 17, noticed that Edexcel’s A-level music syllabus featured 63 male composers and no female ones.

She contacted Edexcel to make it aware of the situation, but despite the board’s insistence that the music course aims to let students “engage in and extend the appreciation of the diverse and dynamic heritage of music”, its head of music seemed reluctant to implement any changes.

In response to an email from Jessy, the head of music wrote: “Given that female composers were not prominent in the western classical tradition (or others for that matter), there would be very few female composers that could be included.”

*chuckles* so because there would be very few female composers, they figured they'd just not include a single one. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest it was less about difficulties in finding examples of female composers (though I accept certain periods and musical traditions would prove a challenge) so much as it just never occurred to them to actively include female composers, because this is how music has always been taught.

Well done to the lass who got them to change. And kudos to the exam board for making a relatively swift and genuine change in response (despite some early, kneejerk defensiveness and heel digging).

Pearson, the organisation that offers the Edexcel qualifications, has now implemented changes to its 2016 A-level music specification to include five new set works by female composers. They include Clara Schumann, Rachel Portman, Kate Bush, Anoushka Shankar and Kaija Saariaho.

Additionally, Pearson has reviewed the wider listening recommendations and there are now 12 works by female composers listed.

Speaking about the changes, Anderson said: “We have updated our music AS and A-level specification to achieve a better balance of female and male composers. We took on board feedback from Jessy and a range of experts to ensure we found the right balance.

“We are keen to ensure diversity is reflected through the qualification and we hope schools and students are pleased with this outcome. Jessy deserves recognition and congratulations for her successful campaign.”

Read the rest here:

http://www.theguardian.com/education...mccabe-edexcel

[DanaC]

And then there's this:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...-draft-protest

A move by the UK government to drop feminism from the A-level politics syllabus has triggered outrage among campaigners and students.

The section on feminism in a revised version of the course put to consultation by the Department for Education has been removed, along with the topics of sex/gender, gender equality and patriarchy. Furthermore, only one woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, appears in a list of seven political thinkers in the draft.

Now, I am guessing socialism and liberalism will both still be on that syllabus - and no doubt there will be stuff about class and labour relations - but let's not teach feminism as ever having been part of our political landscape or having had any role, at any time in its two centuries of history and multiple iterations and evolutions in shaping our current political systems and institutions.

And poor old Mary Wollstonecraft - always the only chick at the gig. She must get so fucking lonely.

And I am so tired of hearing the excuse that, women weren't part of the public picture for much of history - there weren't many women composers, or writers, or thinkers of prominence, or culture makers, or scientists or political animals. It's a lazy excuse - because there were always a few. They made an impact in their day but historians let them slide away unseen. So we compound that travesty by accepting the analysis of academics who did not consider women worth recording or investigating as historical subjects. We look back through the eyes of historians and cannot see any women and so we say, look there were no women - therefore to say that there were would be to misrepresent our past - a well-meaning lie to assuage modern sensibilities.

And it is important. This stuff matters.

Student June Eric-Udorie has launched a petition to urge Nicky Morgan, the education secretary and women’s minister, against going ahead with the changes and urged her to add more female thinkers to the A-level politics syllabus.

She writes: “When women are underrepresented in society, the government should be working to address this problem. As a young woman and student, it is imperative that girls and boys get the full picture at school, or we are doing them a disservice. It has been said that you cannot be what you cannot see. Female role models are important.”

[xoxoxoBruce]

The A-level music syllabus was probably created when women knew their place, and now it's reused over each year and making money with no work. These meddling wimmin are rocking the boat, shameful behavior, anti-business, not cricket, anti-tradition, eroding foundations of the empire, what are the posh to do.

[DanaC]

All women, unless they have some serious medical condition, menstruate every month from the age of puberty until the menopause - so, if we say starting roughly from the age of 11 and going on roughly to the age of 50 that's around four decades. Every month for around forty years we have this thing to deal with. And yet, somehow our tax system in the UK continues to consider sanitary towels and tampons a 'luxury' item and therefore imposes sales tax. MPs recently voted to maintain that classification.

[xoxoxoBruce]

consider sanitary towels and tampons a 'luxury' item

Is "luxury item" how tax or not is determined? I think here they call it non-necessities, but amounts to the same thing I guess.


If they're not taxed, they become cheaper, and more women will buy them, then when women have them they'll get dressed, resulting in them wanting to leave the house, and clogging up traffic, and making TV dinners when the lord returns to the manor.

[DanaC]

There are different bands of VAT (value added tax). In fairness to the government, the VAT system is byzantine and partly a matter of EU regulation. We end up with some truly bizarre classification issues. Such as the great Jaffa Cake tax question. I don't know iof you guys have Jaffa Cakes over there, but they're like the bastard child of cake and biscuit. The base is a kind of dense, dry, either cakey biscuit, or biscuity cake. They call it sponge cake. Then there's a layer of orange jam then chocolate.

Biscuits and cakes are in different VAT categories -

In the United Kingdom, value added tax is payable on chocolate-covered biscuits, but not on chocolate-covered cakes.[12] McVities defended its classification of Jaffa Cakes as cakes at a VAT tribunal in 1991, against the ruling that Jaffa Cakes were biscuits due to their size and shape, and the fact that they were often eaten in place of biscuits.[13] McVities insisted that the product was a cake, and according to rumour produced a giant Jaffa Cake in court to illustrate its point.[13] The product was assessed on the following criteria:[14][15]
The product's name was regarded as a minor consideration.
The ingredients were regarded as similar to those of a cake, producing a thin cake-like batter rather than the thick dough of a biscuit.
The product's texture was regarded as being that of a sponge cake.
The product hardens when stale, in the manner of a cake.
A substantial part of the Jaffa Cake, in terms of bulk and texture, is sponge.
In size, the Jaffa Cake is more like a biscuit than a cake.
The product was generally displayed for sale alongside other biscuits, rather than with cakes.
The product is presented as a snack and eaten with the fingers, like a biscuit, rather than with a fork as a cake might be. The tribunal also considered that children would eat them in "a few mouthfuls", in the manner of a sweet.

The court found in favour of McVities and ruled that the product should be considered a cake, meaning that VAT is not paid on Jaffa Cakes in the United Kingdom.[12][16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_...iscuit_for_VAT


The argument against making menstrual products tax-exempt is that it is a problem under EU regulations (I'm not wholly sure why). The same is true of contraceptives. But - ya know - Cameron's currently going to the mat in Europe over the right to withhold in-work benefits from EU migrants, and they went to the mat to stop the EU enforcing limits on bankers' bonuses - and that's real fighting. That's not navigating a tricky bureacratic monolith and trying to iron out the quirks, that's the full-on drawing of lines in the sand and threats to leave the Union. But they vote, with barely a ripple, against any attempt to make these essential products, that all women, rich or poor will have to use for most of their adult lives, if they want to be able to fully and freely participate in the world outside their homes and not have to hide away one week in four, exempt.

We're not talking about staggering sums here - it's maybe a difference of around .30p per woman, per month. But that shit matters if you're already buying the super cheap 20p per tin spaghetti bolgnese, or 15p baked beans to survive. That extra 30p, is a fucking meal.


Anyways. I came in here to post this:

I remember the Everyday Sexism site launching and have read some of Laura Bates's articles -but I'd never seen her speak. This is an excellent talk:

[Clodfobble]

Is it all menstrual products, or is it like cake/biscuit where tampons are taxed but pads are not? I only ask because everyone keeps very distinctly talking about tampons and nothing else.

[DanaC]

It's all menstrual products. It just got christened the Tampon Tax because of our media's obsession with alliteration :p