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Tag: Gender Discrimination

Iran’s Gender Justice Uprising Joined by Teachers, Unionists

Posted on by Alborz Ghandehari
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The world is currently witnessing an uprising in Iran, in the face of great state brutality, for liberation from gender, social and economic oppression.

This nationwide revolt, the latest in a series of popular uprisings, was sparked by the brutal killing two weeks ago of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Zhina Amini, in custody of the state’s Guidance Patrol, or “morality police,” for so-called improper hijab (headscarf and coverings legally mandated in Iran for women).

Protesters have called for an end to the dictatorship, that the policing of women’s bodies be stopped, that hijab be optional according to each individual’s personal choice, an end to discrimination against Kurdish people and other ethnic minorities in Iran, and an end to economic injustice.

Women and young people are at the forefront of these protests and students at numerous universities have boycotted classes. At least 83 protesters have been killed by security forces.

What we are witnessing in Iran is a feminist revolt that has sparked a larger anti-government uprising.

The current uprising also helps illustrate the centrality of gender justice to working-class struggle.

Last week, Kurdish shopkeepers launched a general strike across Iranian Kurdistan in protest of Zhina’s killing, and some workers and labor unionists across the country are taking action to support the uprising as well. In a statement this week, the Council of Contract Oil Workers said they “support the popular struggles against organized and daily violence against women and against poverty” and threatened to withhold their labor if the state does not end its “arrests, massacring of people, repression, and harassment and harm of women because of hijab.”

On September 25, the Coordination Council of teachers’ unions in Iran threw its weight behind the uprising and launched a two-day strike.

The teachers, who have been engaged in a wave of strikes and protests since last December, wrote that the uprising shows “Iran is still alive and active, and does not bow down in the face of oppression.” The Council condemned the use of schools in the country as militarized bases to suppress protesters. They called on all working and retired teachers — as well as retirees in government, army, and social service sectors, workers’ unions, athletes and artists — to stand alongside “the rights-seeking people of Iran.”

A coalition of women teachers on strike released their own statement declaring “our solidarity with other justice-seeking people and protesters to this crime for which there is no accountability and never will be.”

While on strike this week, teachers urged Iran’s broader labor movement to escalate the current uprising against the Iranian state to help secure gender justice, democratic freedoms and economic equality.

As 60 percent of teachers in Iran are women, they have an important role to play in the current uprising.

The leadership of the teachers’ unions is overwhelmingly male, but women teachers have increasingly formed core cadre in the recent strikes and protests.

Many women leaders in the teachers’ movement have made demands in recent months that are key for the success of the current popular struggle, and show the intersection of working-class and gender struggles.

They have demanded sex education around issues of healthcare and sexual harassment, as well as contraception, which is significant given Iran’s 2021 population law which imposed increased restrictions on abortions and banned the distribution of free contraceptives by the healthcare system. They have demanded expanded maternity leave and daycare centers at the workplace. And they have demanded that school administrations stop harassing them for improper hijab.

These calls from a segment of working-class Iranian women form an integral part of the broader Iranian feminist movement which has been thrust onto the global stage in recent weeks.

In many ways, the slogan of “Woman, Life, Freedom” that has swept the country’s streets in recent days goes hand in hand with the slogan of “Bread, Work, Freedom,” which emerged during previous nationwide uprisings in Iran against austerity and the high cost of living, both in late 2017 as well as in November 2019 when a gas price increase quickly led to anti-government protests.

Actions like these show the importance of leadership by women workers.

These workers are part of a larger Iranian working class that has taken part in an uptick in strikes and labor militancy in recent years, from sectors as diverse as petrochemicals, trucking, and heavy equipment. These actions have come as a result of domestic and international crises in global capitalism, and the greed of both domestic and foreign elites.

The uprising in Iran must also be seen in an international context, as part of a larger global movement for gender equality across the world among women and trans, queer, and non-binary people who are facing different, yet interrelated types of attacks.

Solidarity protests in countries such as Chile, Lebanon and Turkey have amplified the uprising in Iran and lent protesters morale.

This blog originally appeared in full at In These Times on September 30, 2022. Republished with permission. View Workplace Fairness’ page on discrimination in the workplace.

About the Author: Alborz Ghandehari is a Salt Lake City-based organizer, performance poet, and Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah.


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Gender Inequality, Work Hours, and the Future of Work

Posted on by Ariane Hegewisch
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Executive Summary

Gender differences in paid and unpaid time at work are an important aspect of gender inequality. Women tend to spend more time on unpaid household and family care work, and men spend more time in paid work. This unequal distribution of time creates barriers to women’s advancement at work and reduces women’s economic security.

Technological innovation through machine learning, robotics, and artificial intelligence is likely to automate many tasks and jobs, thus improving productivity, freeing time, and allowing fewer workers to do more. Technological innovation presents an opportunity to rethink the distribution of time spent on paid and unpaid work, tackle the inequality in the division of domestic and care work between women and men, and provide time for upskilling and lifelong learning needed to benefit from future opportunities.

This first section of this report presents analysis on why work hours matter to gender equality, and what role time-related policies may play in reducing gender inequality, and more generally, social and economic inequality. The findings show women’s growing contribution to paid work and highlight that, as women’s average hours at work have increased, men’s have not declined. Inequality in paid and unpaid time has remained particularly stark between mothers and fathers. The report then highlights the growing inequality between those who work a lot and those who work intermittently, part-time, or part-year. In addition, the analysis shows that this polarization in paid time at work is increasingly exacerbating racial inequalities.

The second section of the report focuses on changes in the quality of time at work and workforce policies around scheduling, location, and paid time off. The report notes how a growing lack of schedule control and the absence of paid leave rights reinforce economic and racial/ethnic inequalities and are particularly harmful to parents.  The report ends with recommendations to achieve a healthier and more equal distribution of hours worked.

Based on analysis of the U.S. Current Population Survey, the report presents trends in hours worked during the last forty years for workers ages 25 to 64, with the following findings:

Women’s Hours Rose During the Last 40 Years, While Men’s Declined Marginally

  • During the last 40 years, women’s average annual number of hours in paid work increased substantially, while average hours worked by men during the same period declined only marginally. In 2017, women’s average annual hours were slightly below 40 per week (1,863 hours per year), while men’s were above (2,110 hours per year).
  • The increase in annual hours was particularly strong for women who work full-time (at least 35 hours per week). On average, women full-time workers now work five more weeks per year than they did in 1977, and men one more week. As a sign of growing polarization of paid time at work, average weeks in paid work for women who work less than full-time did not increase in the last two decades, and decreased for men who work less than full-time.

Fathers Work More Hours than Other Men, Mothers Work Less Hours than Other Women

  • Since 1977, mothers increased the time spent in paid employment by more than 300 hours per year (an increase of 29 percent). Over the same period, the average annual hours of fathers fell by just 8 hours (or 1 percent).
  • Fathers work more hours on average than other men, and mothers work fewer paid hours than other women, in each major racial and ethnic group. White fathers spend the highest number of hours at work, and the gap in annual hours between White mothers and fathers is the largest among all groups at 21 percent.
  • Black mothers spend more time than other mothers in paid work, and have done so throughout the last four decades, and before. In 1977, Black women worked over 200 hours, around five weeks, more per year than White or Hispanic mothers. By 2017, Black mothers were still on average working over 104 hours more than Hispanic mothers, 89 hours more than White mothers, and 52 hours more than Asian mothers.
  • Forty years ago, married mothers’ average working time per year was approximately 20 percent lower than that of single mothers; by 2017, the difference was no more than 3 percent. The same convergence in hours has not happened among married and single fathers.
  • The impact of marriage on the work hours of mothers varies starkly by race and ethnicity. Among White and Asian women, average annual hours are lower for married than for single mothers; the reverse is true for Black mothers, and for Hispanic women there is no appreciable difference.

Women Outnumber Men among Part-Time Workers and are Almost as Likely as Men to Work Part-Time Involuntarily

  • The rate of part-time work varies over the life cycle, and is highest at the beginning and at the end of the working life for both women and men. Women part-time workers outnumber men at each stage of the life cycle, but the differences are particularly high during early- and mid-career.
  • Almost nine in 10 of those who work part-time because of child care and other family-related reasons are women. Part-time work is significantly more common in low-wage occupations, such as cashiers, customer service representatives, and nursing and personal care workers, where women are the majority of the workforce and it is less common to have stable hours.
  • Part-time work is often of lower quality than full-time work, with lower pay and few benefits. Providing part-time workers with lower benefits or pay than comparable full-time workers is illegal in most other high-income economies.
  • Women are close to half of all involuntary part-time workers. The share of Black and Hispanic women part-time workers (ages 25 years and older) who report that they worked part-time involuntarily (22 and 21 percent, respectively) is more than twice as high as for White women (10 percent), and nearly twice as high as it is for Asian women (12 percent).

Increasing Overwork Creates Barriers to Women’s Advancement at Work and Exacerbates Gender Inequality at Home

  • Nearly one in five women (18.2 percent) and nearly one in three men (31.8 percent) usually work more than 40 hours per week. For the majority of workers in this category, this means working more than 50 hours per week.
  • The practice of overwork in many professional and managerial positions reduces women’s access to the highest paid jobs because of the imbalance in family care responsibilities; likewise, overwork also makes it more difficult for men to contribute equally to care and domestic work.
  • Research shows that working long hour days or weeks on a regular basis has adverse health consequences, reduces productivity, increases workplace injuries, and leads to lower job satisfaction.
  • Unlike many other countries, where hours of work are more regulated as part of a concern with health and safety, the U.S Labor code offers few protections from overwork (with the potential exception for workers with disabilities under the ADA).

Work Schedules Have Become Less Regular Regardless of the Number of Hours Worked

  • During the last decade, the line between work and non-work time has become increasingly blurred for full-time and part-time workers in both lower and higher-paid occupations. A substantial number of women in low-wage jobs have little control over the timing of their work.
  • While some parents may proactively seek employment during non-standard hours as a means of organizing employment around child care needs, schedule fluctuations still have adverse impacts on parents and children.
  • A growing number of U.S. workers work remotely thanks to advances in communication technologies. While control over where and when they work is a highly sought-after benefit, it often comes at a price—either due to work overload or adverse career consequences for making use of flexible working options.
  • Business case studies—such as the Gap study, where workers were provided greater say over their schedules—show that using scheduling technology to allow workers a say leads to higher revenues and improved productivity.

The Lack of Legal Rights to Paid Time Off is Exacerbating Inequality and Reduces Women’s Labor Force Participation

  • The lack of paid parental leave is one factor accounting for women’s lower labor force participation rate in the United States compared with other high income countries. Job protected paid maternity leave improves women’s labor market participation, allows them to maintain and build their earnings, and improves maternal and infant health.
  • Access to paid time off and the length of paid time off is highly unequal. Low-wage workers are much less likely to have access to paid sick benefits, paid vacation and holidays, and paid family leave than higher earning workers. Hispanic workers are least likely to have access to paid sick time.

Policy Recommendations

Redistributing and reorganizing hours of work is one way of distributing productivity gains from automation equitably, smoothing the potential disruptive impact of technological displacement, and encouraging greater gender equality in paid and unpaid work.

Recommendations to improve equity in work hours include:

  • Guarantee paid family leave, paid sick days, and paid vacation. Investing in paid leave policies that address life cycle needs for time off (for parenthood, education, elder care and civic engagement) can potentially increase GDP by increasing labor force participation rates, particularly for women.
  • Improve access to quality part-time or reduced hours work. Legislation to provide workers who work less than 35 hours with the right to equal treatment in pay, promotions, and benefits, and to give employees options for reducing their hours without having to change employment or their career, can improve access to quality part-time work.
  • Increase worker control over the scheduling of their time at work. New scheduling technology makes it easier and less costly to prepare schedules and allocate shifts in occupations with extensive operating hours. Fair scheduling statutes passed in several jurisdictions offer examples of how to provide workers with more stability in the time they work.
  • Discourage extensive overwork and overtime. Providing workers with a right to refuse mandatory overtime, and providing mandatory rest times between shifts, will reduce scheduling conflict and improve health. Updating overtime earnings thresholds, and ensuring that a larger number of women and men are covered by overtime regulations, will reduce employer incentives to make long hours an expected component of employment.
  • Provide paid time for employees to upgrade their skills as technology changes. Technological innovation is affecting the delivery of learning and increasing the options for remote access to instruction. Yet, learning will continue to take time, time outside of paid work that women often do not have because of their care commitments. Paid time to upgrade skills and pursue lifelong learning can reduce inequality in access to new employment opportunities.
  • Encourage work sharing through the Unemployment Insurance system during times of economic transition and downturns and facilitate work sharing more broadly. During slack business or downturns, work sharing arrangements allow workers to receive unemployment benefits to compensate for loss of earnings if their hours are temporarily cut back. This allows employers to retain valued and skilled workers and provides greater economic security and workforce attachment to workers.
  • Promote a reduction in the standard working week. Even though it fails to be the reality for many workers, the 40-hour workweek nevertheless has become the benchmark against which working time is judged. The 40-hour threshold has not been improved since 1938 and the coming decades provide an opportunity to share time and rewards more equally by lowering the legal definition of full-time work.

Technological innovation in the coming decades will provide opportunities to promote a more equal distribution of work, leisure, and family and community time. Technology is already making it much easier for employers and employees to design win-win solutions on scheduling and the location of work. While the reduction of paid time at work alone is unlikely to eliminate gender inequality, it can support men in being good caregivers and make it easier for women to succeed at work. Without proactive policy interventions on time at work, however, gender inequalities at work and at home will likely persist—or worse, increase.

Read the full report.

This report was originally published at Institute For Women’s Policy Research on November 14, 2019. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Ariane Hegewisch is Program Director of Employment and Earnings at IWPR and Scholar in Residence at American University; prior to that she spent two years at IWPR as a scholar-in-residence. She came to IWPR from the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings. She is responsible for IWPR’s research on workplace discrimination and is a specialist in comparative human resource management, with a focus on policies and legislative approaches to facilitate greater work life reconciliation and gender equality, in the US and internationally. Prior to coming to the USA she taught comparative European human resource management at Cranfield School of Management in the UK where she was a founding researcher of the Cranet Survey of International HRM, the largest independent survey of human resource management policies and practices, covering 25 countries worldwide. She started her career  in local economic development, developing strategies for greater gender equality in employment and training in  local government in the UK. She has published many papers and articles and co-edited several books, including â€Women, work and inequality: The challenge of equal pay in a deregulated labour market”. She is German and has a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in Development Studies from the IDS, Sussex.
About the Author: Valerie Lacarte, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. She conducts empirical analysis for research projects related to the Future of Work, entrepreneurship, and the Student Parent Success Initiative.

Prior to joining IWPR, Valerie had more than seven years of experience doing research and project implementation for development organizations, including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Organization of American States. Valerie has worked and lived in several countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and is fluent in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. She has also been an Adjunct Instructor at American University, George Mason University and University of Mary Washington where she taught Economic Theory, Business and Society, and Gender Economics.

Valerie has a PhD in Economics from American University. Her dissertation combined quantitative and qualitative data to analyze immigrant labor outcomes while considering the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity and culture.


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Reckoning With the Hidden Rules of Gender in the Tax Code: How Low Taxes on Corporations and the Wealthy Impact Women’s Economic Opportunity and Security

Posted on by National Women's Law Center
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Reckoning With the Hidden Rules of Gender in the Tax Code: How Low Taxes on Corporations and the Wealthy Impact Women’s Economic Opportunity and Security We’re excited to announce that NWLC, in partnership with Groundwork Collaborative, the Roosevelt Institute, and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, released three reports about gender and racial bias in the tax code and how to harness our tax laws as a tool for equity.
Reckoning With The Hidden Rules of Gender in the Tax Code, tackles some aspects of the tax code that shape corporate and individual behaviors in ways that have negative downstream effects on women and especially women of color. Among other things, this report analyzes how the tax code incents or enables exorbitant executive compensation at the expense of worker pay; how the tax code’s treatment of debt fuels predatory behavior by private equity firms; how particular tax provisions could encourage worker misclassification; and how corporations with a high share of women and people of color as employees engaged in big stock buybacks at the expense of increasing worker pay in the wake of the 2017 tax law.  We call out specific examples from Starbucks, Toys R Us, and Hilton.
You can access the final reports and executive summary here, and an article by Annie Lowrey at the Atlantic here.

This article was originally published at National Women’s Law Center. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: This report, co-authored by Katy Milani (Roosevelt Institute,  https://rooseveltinstitute.org), Melissa Boteach (NWLC), Steph Sterling (Roosevelt Institute), and Sarah Hassmer (NWLC), discusses how low taxes for the wealthy and corporations have played a role in enabling – and in some cases encouraging – those with the highest incomes and the most capital to accumulate outsized wealth and power in our economy. Centuries of discrimination and subjugation of women and people of color interact today with widening income inequality, such that white, non-Hispanic men are disproportionately represented among the wealthiest households, while labor and economic contributions from women of color are consistently undervalued. An agenda to advance racial and gender justice must reckon with provisions in our tax code perpetuate and enable these inequities.

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The Trump administration wants to make it easier to fire women who act too â€masculine’

Posted on by Ian Millhiser
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Thirty years ago, in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the Supreme Court held that “sex stereotyping” is forbidden by a federal law banning employment discrimination. “We are beyond the day,” Justice William Brennan wrote in the court’s plurality opinion, “when an employer could evaluate employees by assuming or insisting that they matched the stereotype associated with their group.”

Nevertheless, the Trump administration filed a brief last week asking the Supreme Court to bring back the day when an employer could evaluate employees by assuming or insisting that they matched the stereotype associated with their group.

The Trump Justice Department’s position in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC wouldn’t nuke Price Waterhouse entirely. But it would severely weaken protections against sex discrimination, and give employers broad new authority to fire employees who do not comply with stereotypes about how people of a particular gender should appear.

It would do so, moreover, in service of the broader goal of denying civil rights protections to transgender workers. The thrust of the Trump administration’s position in Harris Funeral Homes is that, if existing law is broad enough to protect trans workers from discrimination, then that law must be rolled back — even if doing so will legalize a fair amount of discrimination against cis women in the process.

“Because of . . . sex”

Harris Funeral Homes involves Aimee Stephens, a trans woman who was fired because of her decision to transition. Her former boss claims to “believe that the Bible teaches that a person’s sex is an immutable God-given gift.”

In response to her termination, Stephens sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides that employers may not “discharge any individual…because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Thus, as a textual matter, Stephens should have an easy case. Title VII’s language is capacious. It forbids any discrimination “because of” an employee’s “sex” (a term that, in this context, refers to gender). As the federal appeals court that ruled in her favor explained, “it is analytically impossible to fire an employee based on that employee’s status as a transgender person without being motivated, at least in part, by the employee’s sex.”

The entire reason why Stephens was fired is that her employer believes that she is a man, and that men must dress and act a certain way. That’s discrimination because of sex.

Stereotyping

Setting aside this simple, textual argument explaining why Stephens should prevail, she also benefits from the separate line of cases prohibiting sex stereotyping — or, at least, she does under those cases as they currently stand.

Price Waterhouse is a bit of a confusing decision because it did not produce a single majority opinion. Nevertheless, a majority of the Supreme Court clearly agreed that sex stereotyping is not allowed. Brennan concluded, on behalf of himself and three other justices, that “Congress intended to strike at the entire spectrum of disparate treatment of men and women resulting from sex stereotypes.’”

Meanwhile, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that the plaintiff in Price Waterhousecould proceed with her lawsuit because she proved that “stereotypical attitudes towards women [played] a significant, though unquantifiable, role” in her employer’s decision not to make her a partner. So Brennan’s opinion plus O’Connor’s opinion equals five votes against sex stereotyping in the workplace.

Significantly, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a dissenting opinion, in which he argued that “Title VII creates no independent cause of action for sex stereotyping.” Though Kennedy conceded that “evidence of use by decisionmakers of sex stereotypes is, of course, quite relevant to the question of discriminatory intent,” his dissenting opinion denied that sex stereotyping alone is a valid basis for a Title VII lawsuit.

Which brings us to the Trump administration’s argument in is Harris Funeral Homesbrief:

Stephens’s and the Sixth Circuit’s sex-stereotyping argument rests on the incorrect premise that Price Waterhouse construed Title VII to prohibit sex stereotypes per se. But that case, which produced no majority opinion, merely recognized that a plaintiff can use evidence that an employer engaged in sex stereotyping to show that the employer discriminated because of sex under the ordinary Title VII rubric. It did not recognize sex stereotyping as a novel, freestanding category of Title VII liability.

See the problem here? This passage does not describe the majority’s view in Price Waterhouse at all. To the contrary, it’s the exact same view that Justice Kennedy took in dissent.

Having confused the majority’s view with a dissent, the Trump administration then claims that much of Price Waterhouse must be rolled back.

Indeed, it’s notable that the Trump administration is only able to cite one lower court opinion that supports its novel view of Price Waterhouse, and that opinion is a concurring opinion by Judge James Ho — a Trump judge known for writing aggressive opinions that read more like Fox News editorials than like judicial decisions. The Ho opinion that Trump’s Justice Department relies upon does not cite any other case that shares his reading of Price Waterhouse.

Price Waterhouse, moreover, is hardly an obscure case. It is a seminal decision that recognized an entire branch of American civil rights law. According to the legal research database Lexis Advance, 6,265 court decisions cite Price Waterhouse. The fact that Judge Ho (and the Trump administration) wasn’t able to find a single one that supports his reading of Price Waterhouse is compelling evidence that Ho is wrong.

It’s unclear just how drastically the Trump administration’s reading of Price Waterhousewould roll back protections for women generally, but one line in their brief suggests that the rollback would be quite significant. Unless Price Waterhouse is read narrowly, the Trump Justice Department warns, “a dress code that required men to wear neckties, for example, would be susceptible to challenge as predicated on sex stereotypes.”

Perhaps. A prototypical example of sex stereotyping is declaring that men must look a certain way and women must look another way (although some lower courts permit gender-specific dress codes so long as they are “equally burdensome” on men and women). At the very least, the Trump administration appears eager to strip all American workers of their right to keep their job even if they don’t tailor their appearance to their employer’s gender norms.

One lesson of Harris Funeral Homes, in other words, is likely to be that the fate of various civil rights plaintiffs are unavoidably linked. Denying trans workers the right to be free of employment discrimination means rolling back doctrines that protect other workers as well.

If the Supreme Court joins the Trump administration’s crusade against trans rights, the consequences will spill over to all workers.

This article was originally published by Ian Millhiser on August 20, 2019. Reprinted with permission. 

About the Author: Ian Millhiser is the Justice Editor for ThinkProgress, and the author of Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted.


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Caster Semenya gets reprieve from discriminatory regulations, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be

Posted on by Lindsay Gibbs
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On Monday, news outlets around the globe ran headlines reporting that South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya won an important court battle. The two-time Olympic champion in the 800 meters had filed an appeal last week to challenge the Court of Arbitration in Sports’ (CAS) ruling that she must artificially lower her testosterone levels in order to compete in her best events.

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court (SFT) provided Monday’s announcement on the matter, ruling that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) would have to temporarily suspend its testosterone regulations for Semenya, while her appeal awaits decision. As such, she is currently permitted to participate in competition without having to self-administer hormone treatments.

But while these headlines provide an optimistic spin on these events, they hardly paint a realistic picture.

First of all, the suspension of CAS’s ruling is very temporary — right now, it only lasts until June 25, 2019. Furthermore, this three-week grace period only applies to Semenya. Any other women with naturally-occurring levels of testosterone above five nanamoles per liter (nmol/L) are still required to undergo medical treatment to artificially suppress their testosterone levels if they want to compete in IAAF events from 400 meters to a mile.

It’s fair to say that this decision has left athletes more perplexed than ever.

“There’s widespread confusion and even panic among athletes and coaches about whether they can compete, at what level, and what this implementation means for them,” Dr. Katrina Karazis, a senior visiting fellow at Yale University’s Global Health Justice Partnership and co-author of Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, told ThinkProgress.

Semenya has been battling the IAAF for the right to run in the body she was born in for 10 years now, ever since she first burst onto the scene at the 2009 World Championships. In May, CAS upheld the ability of the IAAF to target athletes with disorders of sex development (DSD). People with DSD — a condition which is commonly referred to as intersex — might have hormones, genes, or reproductive organs that develop outside the gender binary.

CAS agreed with Semenya that the IAAF regulations were discriminatory. However, the majority of the people serving on that panel endorsed the decision anyway.

“The Panel found that the DSD Regulations are discriminatory, but the majority of the Panel found that, on the basis of the evidence submitted by the parties, such discrimination is a necessary, reasonable, and proportionate means of achieving the IAAF’s aim of preserving the integrity of female athletics in the Restricted Events,” the ruling states.

In her appeal, Semenya’s team argued that forcing Semenya and other women with DSD to artificially suppress their testosterone levels is a human rights violation. However, on Tuesday, the IAAF released a defiant open letter to a group of women’s rights organizations that have opposed the testosterone regulations. The letter provides a window into the IAAF’s mindset, painting the members of the governing body as angered at having their wisdom challenged. And the IAAF is not only is it doubling down on its decision, it is doing everything short of explicitly calling Semenya a man along the way.

“It is not fair and meaningful for biological women (with XX chromosomes that lead to ovaries that produce much lower levels of testosterone) to compete against men,” the letter reads.

“The challenge that the IAAF faces is how to accommodate individuals who identify as female (and are legally recognised as female) but who — because of a difference of sex development — have XY chromosomes that lead to testes that produce high levels of testosterone, and therefore have all the same physical advantages over women for the purposes of athletics as men have over women,” it continues.

It is worth noting that if Semenya competed against the men, her time in the 800 meters would not put her anywhere near even qualifying for the Olympics.

“I am a woman and I am a world-class athlete,” Semenya said in her appeal last week. “The IAAF will not drug me or stop me from being who I am.”

For now, the IAAF will have until June 25 to fight this temporary suspension. If it does not get the suspension overturned, or misses the deadline, Semenya will be able to continue to compete in her best events in the body she was born in until there is a ruling on her appeal — a process that could take a year or more, depending on the SFT’s actions.

But this narrow ruling will have consequences in the meantime, as all other women with DSDs will have to either take medication, undergo invasive surgery, or abandon events between 400 meters and one mile if they want to continue to compete against women in elite competitions. If the temporary suspension is overturned on June 25, Semenya has stated that she will not take medication or suppress her testosterone levels in any way; she plans to compete in events longer than one mile, such as the 2,000 meters.

Semenya is scheduled to compete in one event in the next three weeks, the Meeting de Montreuil outside of Paris, France, on June 11.

This article was originally published in ThinkProgress on June 4, 2019. Reprinted with permission. 

About the Author: Lindsay Gibbs covers sports. SportsReporter CoHost  Tennis  Mystics   


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Women’s national team escalates dispute with U.S. Soccer, filing gender discrimination lawsuit

Posted on by ThinkProgress Staff
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The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team took a big step in its ongoing wage dispute with the U.S. Soccer Federation on Friday — which, not coincidentally, was International Women’s Day — when it filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the organization.

“Despite the fact that these female and male players are called upon to perform the same job responsibilities on their teams and participate in international competitions for their single common employer, the USSF, the female players have been consistently paid less money than their male counterparts,” the complaint, filed by all 28 members of the USWNT in United States District Court in Los Angeles, states.

“This is true even though their performance has been superior to that of the male players — with the female players, in contrast to male players, becoming world champions.”

Indeed, the USWNT has won three World Cup titles, most recently in 2015, and is one of the favorites headed into the 2019 Women’s World Cup this summer in France. It is currently the top-ranked women’s soccer team in the world. The men’s team failed to even qualify for last year’s men’s World Cup

In the suit, which was first reported by the New York Times, the players are requesting back pay and damages, as they allege that “institutionalized gender discrimination” by USSF has impacted everything from their bank accounts to their living situations — including their health care, coaching, and even travel accommodations.

This is an escalation of a long-standing battle between the women and the federation that employs them. Three years ago, five USWNT players filed a wage-discrimination lawsuit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). However, there has been no movement on that lawsuit, which led the players to request and receive a right-to-sue letter from the EEOC last month. With this new lawsuit, the players are seeking class-action status, so they can represent any current or former USWNT player dating back to February 4, 2014. Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Carli Lloyd — four of the most talented and high-profile soccer players in the world — are the lead plaintiffs on the suit.

Two years ago, after a lengthy #EqualPlayEqualPay campaign, the USWNT and USSF ratified a new collective bargaining agreement that improved pay and travel accommodations, and provided the players’ union with more control over licensing and marketing rights. However, the new lawsuit makes clear that the new CBA did not go far enough to address inequities between the men’s and women’s teams.

In reality, the USSF has utterly failed to promote gender equality. It has stubbornly refused to treat its female employees who are members of the WNT equally to its male employees who are members of the MNT. The USSF, in fact, has admitted that it pays its female player employees than its male player employees and has gone so far as to claim that â€market realities are such that the women do not deserve to be paid equally to the men.’ The USSF admits such purposeful gender discrimination even during times when the WNT earned more profit, played more games, won more games, earned more championships, and/or garnered higher television audiences.

According to the suit, from 2013 to 2016, a comparison of the WNT and MNT pay shows that if each team played 20 friendlies in a year and each team won all 20 friendlies, female WNT players would earn a maximum of $99,000, or $4,950 per game, while similarly situated male MNT players would earn an average of $263,320, or $13,166 per game.

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It also goes into detail about the fact that not only are the female players earning far less than male players, despite having far more success, they’re actually playing more matches for the federation as well.

In light of the WNT’s on-field success, Plaintiffs often spend more time practicing for and playing in matches, more time in training camps, more time traveling and more time participating in media sessions, among other duties and responsibilities, than similarly situated MNT players. For example, from 2015 through 2018, the WNT played 19 more games than the MNT played over that same period of time. As the MNT averaged approximately 17 games per year in that time frame, the WNT played the equivalent of more than one additional MNT calendar year session from 2015 through 2018. The USSF, nevertheless, has paid and continues to play Plaintiffs less than similarly situated MNT players.

The timing of this suit does provide the USWNT with leverage — not only is it International Women’s Day, but the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France kicks off in three months. When the USWNT won the 2015 World Cup, 23 million people in the United States tuned in to watch the match, making it the most-watched soccer match in U.S. history, surpassing all men’s matches.

This article was originally published at ThinkProgress on March 8, 2019. Reprinted with permission. 

About the Author: Lindsay Gibbs is a sports reporter at ThinkProgress.


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Women in male-dominated workplaces more likely to be mistreated

Posted on by The Attorneys of Passman and Kaplan
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Nearly half of American women work in places where they outnumber the men. But for millions of other women, employment in a male-dominated workplace can be stressful, dangerous and harmful to their careers.

A Pew Research Center survey confirmed that women in majority-male workplaces are more likely to experience gender discrimination and sexual harassment. The mistreatment is often worst in traditionally male jobs and workplaces without women in positions of authority.

Gender ratios are linked to gender discrimination

The Pew Research survey was conducted in 2017 before the #MeToo movement put a national spotlight on sexual harassment. The research gave credence to a known phenomenon:

  • Sex discrimination – In majority-male workplaces, women were more likely to say they (a) are paid less than men, (b) are treated as not competent, (c) received less support from leadership than their male counterparts, and (d) suffered small but repeated slights based on their gender.
  • Sexual harassment – Women in majority-male workplaces were more likely to say that they had personally been sexually harassed (28 percent). Harassment occurs even in female-dominated occupations, but both men and women said it was less of a problem in those work settings.

Fire station lawsuit is “Exhibit A” of boys’ club mentality

The Justice Department has filed a discrimination lawsuit against the City of Houston. The suit alleges years of egregious harassment against three female firefighters – the only female firefighters – who worked at Houston’s Station 54 firehouse. The lawsuit describes male firefighters behaving badly in a concerted campaign: Racial epithets. Death threats. Ostracizing. Juvenile pranks. Mocking a woman’s dead daughter. And literally marking their territory in the women’s dorm – urinating on toilet seats, urinating on the carpet and defecating in the women’s toilet after covering up the flushing sensor.

It’s definitely a guy thing

While the misconduct alleged at Station 54 is over the top, it fits a pattern. Gender discrimination, a hostile work environment and sexual harassment are often worst in traditionally male occupations: firefighting, dock work, auto repair, law enforcement, computer programming, engineering, construction and landscaping, to name a few. The higher the ratio of men, the more pervasive or brazen the misconduct is likely to be.

The Pew survey noted that women in male-dominated workplaces do not differ much from women in gender-balanced or majority-female workplaces. They have similar demographics as far as age, education, race and ethnicity. The variable is male attitudes toward their female co-workers and subordinates. Many men in majority-male fields view women not as equals but intruders. Management sets a poor example or downplays complaints.

In the #MeToo era, fewer women are willing to put up with the status quo.

This blog was originally published at Passman & Kaplan, P.C., Attorneys at Law on March 15, 2018. Reprinted with permission.

About the Authors: Founded in 1990 by Edward H. Passman and Joseph V. Kaplan, Passman & Kaplan, P.C., Attorneys at Law, is focused on protecting the rights of federal employees and promoting workplace fairness.  The attorneys of Passman & Kaplan (Edward H. Passman, Joseph V. Kaplan, Adria S. Zeldin, Andrew J. Perlmutter, Johnathan P. Lloyd and Erik D. Snyder) represent federal employees before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and other federal administrative agencies, and also represent employees in U.S. District and Appeals Courts.


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A Trailblazing New Law in Illinois Will Dramatically Expand Temp Workers’ Rights

Posted on by Jeff Schuhrke
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Beginning next summer, a sweeping new law will take effect in Illinois, ending many of the routine injustices suffered by the state’s nearly 850,000 temp employees who often work under miserable conditions.

The Responsible Job Creation Act, or HB690, represents the most ambitious attempt to date by any state to regulate the growing temporary staffing industry. Introduced in January, the bill gained bipartisan support in the Illinois General Assembly and was signed into law by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner in late September. The law will take effect June 1, 2018.

The legislation, which addresses job insecurity, hiring discrimination and workplace safety, was championed by the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative (CWC) and Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), as well as the Illinois AFL-CIO and Raise the Floor Alliance, a coalition of eight Chicago worker centers.

The law will require staffing agencies to make an effort to place temp workers into permanent positions as they become available—a step forward in the fight to end “perma-temping.” To address racial bias in hiring, the new law requires temporary staffing agencies record and report the race and gender of all job applicants to the Illinois Department of Labor. And in an effort to reduce the workplace injuries that temps frequently suffer, agencies will also now have to notify workers about the kinds of equipment, training and protective clothing required to perform a job.

State Rep. Carol Ammons—a Democrat from Champaign-Urbana who supported Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—was the bill’s chief sponsor. Activists credit her with getting the bill to the governor’s desk.

“Legislators don’t always get down into the deep part of the process, but this was so personal to me,” Ammons tells In These Times. After her son told her about the problems he had experienced as a temp worker in another state, she began looking into the temp industry in Illinois and became convinced that it needed reform.

“HB690 won support from both Democrats and Republicans, who heard the voices of workers who came to Springfield to educate us about the temp industry,” state Sen. Iris Martinez, a Democrat who joined Ammons in backing the bill, said at a press conference last Thursday. “When you have two strong women of color leading the charge on this kind of bill, things get done.”

Bakari Whitfield, a WWJ activist, says the most important aspect of HB690 for him is “the opportunity to get a built-in permanent job, as opposed to a seasonal temp job.” Whitfield has been a temp worker for over ten years in a warehouses outside of Joliet. “It’s just a revolving door,” he says. “They hire you and fire you around the same time every year. Every six months you have to go get another job,”

The transparency provisions come in response to a pattern of systemic racial and gender discrimination in the temp industry. In Illinois, whistleblowers have alleged that African-American temp workers are routinely passed over for jobs in favor of Latinos, whom employers consider easier to exploit on the job.

A previous Illinois bill that would have required temp agencies to report the demographics of job applicants, SB47, was killed in 2015 after temp industry lobbyists spread misinformation and fostered divisions between Latino and black lawmakers, as reported by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

According to Ammons, lobbyists similarly tried to sink HB690 this year. A community organizer before entering politics, Ammons says she relied on conversations and personal relationships with fellow lawmakers to counter the industry lobby and advance the bill.

Months before even introducing the bill, “I started talking to legislators about what was happening in the industry and what was happening to the workers,” Ammons explains. “We started really pushing our legislators in a way that maybe they had not experienced from another legislator, asking them to take the moral high ground on the issue. They realized we weren’t going to let it go and decided they had to work with us.”

The Responsible Job Creation Act also requires staffing agencies to bear the costs of background checks, drug tests and credit reports for job applicants—costs workers currently have to incur themselves.

CWC activist Freddy Amador, who worked as a temp for five years at a factory in Waukegan, told In These Times that he’s had to pay up to $95 in such fees for a single job application. “You pay and sometimes you’re not even going to get the job,” he says.

“Working folks should never have to be penalized with these fees just to apply for a job,” Ammons said at Thursday’s press conference. “The temp agencies are a business, so they are to bear the costs associated with doing business, not the workers.”

HB690 also requires staffing agencies to provide workers with transportation back from a job site if they were given a ride. Under the current system, temp workers are frequently left stranded with no way to get home.

Ammons has promised to track how the law is being enforced, including whether temp agencies are actually placing temps into permanent positions, but admits there’s still more work to be done. In particular, Ammons hopes to pass a trailer bill that would end the practice of staffing agencies paying temp workers through credit or debit cards, which carry fees.

“That’s double taxation on the worker. They should be able to get a paper check,” Ammons says.

“We now have to ensure there is enforcement [of HB690], not that we create a law and forget about it,” Martinez insists. She has encouraged the temp worker leaders with CWC and WWJ to hold legislators accountable. “It’s up to you to let us know that the law is being acted out responsibly, and if not, don’t be afraid of coming back to us and making sure that we do the right thing.”

This article was originally published at In These Times on October 4, 2017. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Jeff Schuhrke is a Working In These Times contributor based in Chicago. He has a Master’s in Labor Studies from UMass Amherst and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in labor history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a summer 2013 editorial intern at In These Times. Follow him on Twitter: @JeffSchuhrke.


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Facebook’s gender bias goes so deep it’s in the code

Posted on by Lauren Williams
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A hurricane has been brewing at Facebook.

After years of suspicion, a veteran female Facebook engineer decided to evaluate what if any gaps there were in how female and male engineers’ work was treated.

She did it “so that we can have an insight into how the review process impacts people in various groups,” the Wall Street Journal learned exclusively.

Her analysis, conducted in September, found that female engineers’ work was rejected 35 percent more than their male counterparts based on five years of open code-review data. Women also waited 3.9 percent longer to have their code accepted and got 8.2 percent more questions and comments about their work.

Only 13 percent of Facebook’s engineers are women, 17 percent across all tech roles.

The identity of the engineer is unknown, but her findings sparked a whirlwind discussion of gender bias inside the social network after it was released last year. A group of senior Facebook officials led by Facebook’s head of infrastructure, Jay Parikh, conducted their own review of the engineer’s analysis and concluded that the rejection gap was because of the engineer’s rank rather than gender.

Facebook confirmed Parikh’s findings, calling the engineer’s data incomplete, the Wall Street Journal reported. Parikh said in an internal report revealing his analysis that while the gender component wasn’t “statistically significant” it was “still observable and felt by many of you,” and urged employees to take the company’s voluntary implicit bias training.

The report is the latest incidence of the tech industry’s rampant diversity and inclusion problem. In recent years, tech companies such as Facebook, Google, and Yahoo have tried to tackle this by releasing annual diversity reports, which have shown marginal improvements in racial and gender disparities.

But Silicon Valley’s gender problem goes beyond the numbers. Facebook is the second major tech company this year to have potentially damning evidence of gender bias exposed by an employee. Earlier this year, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler detailed her experiences with sexual harassment and stalled career path at the company. Fowler’s story ballooned into a media firestorm, one that Uber still hasn’t recovered from.

Neither of Facebook’s analyses and methodologies have been independently verified, but the preliminary results and Facebook’s response fall in line with how companies have previously dealt with allegations of sexism. Past surveys and studies have found that men in tech often don’t think there’s a gender problem in the industry. And when women report incidents of sexual harassment as culturally pervasive, men have said they were unaware.

Hopefully, Facebook’s voluntary bias training, which stresses bias’ impact and how to get rid of it, will become mandatory.

This post appeared originally in Think Progress on May 2, 2017. Reprinted with permission.

Lauren C. Williams is the tech reporter for ThinkProgress. She writes about the intersection of technology, culture, civil liberties, and policy. In her past lives, Lauren wrote about health care, crime, and dabbled in politics. She is a native Washingtonian with a master’s in journalism from the University of Maryland and a bachelor’s of science in dietetics from the University of Delaware.


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Federal judge concludes transgender worker can sue for sex discrimination

Posted on by Zack Ford
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A federal court in Kentucky is allowing a transgender workplace discrimination suit to proceed, recognizing that mistreatment in regards to gender identity constitutes illegal discrimination on the basis of sex.

Plaintiff Mykel Mickens sued General Electric Appliances (GE) for harassment and disparate treatment in the workplace. He was not permitted to use the men’s restroom, so he had to use a facility much farther away from his work station, and he was then disciplined for how long his breaks were to accommodate that journey. Mickens also had a conflict with an employee, but though GE addressed a complaint one of his white, female colleagues had with that employee, his complaint went unaddressed. He says that when he disclosed that he was transgender to his supervisor, he was singled out and reprimanded for conduct no one else was reprimanded for, and when he reported the harassment, GE said there was nothing it could do.

Federal Chief Judge Joseph McKinley, a Clinton appointee, concluded that there was significant evidence to bring a discrimination case for race and gender discrimination. He agreed there is precedent that punishing an employee for failing to conform to gender stereotypes can qualify as gender discrimination under Title VII. “Significantly,” he wrote, “Plaintiff alleges that GE both permitted continued discrimination and harassment against him and subsequently fired him because he did not conform to the gender stereotype of what someone who was born female [sic] should look and act like.”

McKinley noted that several court cases, including G.G. v. Glouchester County School Board?—?currently before the Supreme Court?—?could impact future trans discrimination suits. In the meantime, however, “what is clear is that the Plaintiff’s complaint sufficiently alleges facts to support discrimination or disparate treatment claims based upon race and gender non-conformity or sex stereotyping.”

GE did not comment directly on the suit but reaffirmed in a statement its commitment to “creating, managing and valuing diversity in our workforce” and “ensuring that our workplace is free from harassment.”

McKinley’s ruling isn’t an automatic victory for Mickens, but it is a sign of progress for those seeking the justice system’s protection for discrimination against transgender people.

Just last week, a transgender man in Louisiana won his discrimination complaint against his employer through arbitration. Tristan Broussard involuntarily resigned from the financial services company he worked for when he was intolerably forced to “act and dress only as a female.” He was awarded more than a year’s salary as well as additional damages for emotional distress.

The Obama administration has extended protections to transgender people in various ways, including advocating for their civil rights in employment discrimination cases. Many advocates worry the Trump administration will roll back these protections and abandon support for these plaintiffs, if not take an antagonistic position against their discrimination claims.

A recent massive survey of transgender people found that 16 percent had lost a job due to being transgender, and 27 percent had either been fired, denied a promotion, or not been hired due to being transgender.

This article was originally posted at Thinkprogress.org on December 13, 2016. Reprinted with permission.

Zack Ford is the LGBT Editor at ThinkProgress.org. Gay, Atheist, Pianist, Unapologetic “Social Justice Warrior.” Contact him at zford@thinkprogress.org. Follow him on Twitter at @ZackFord.


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