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A new report from the United Nations found that women do an estimated 2.6 times the amount of unpaid work that men do - what equates to " emotional labor."

This work that disproportionately falls to women includes vital jobs like taking care of the children and the myriad tasks that come with them, like picking them up from school, caring for elderly parents, managing household expenses and completing chores like cleaning and cooking.

This unpaid physical and emotional labor, the UN noted, doesn't factor into a country's gross domestic product. And that is because societies across the world still don't see "women's work" as valuable, UN Women chief of research and data Shahra Razavi told CNN Money, even though these roles are essential to everyone's well-being.

"If women stopped doing a lot of the work they do unpaid, then the whole economy would collapse," Razavi said.

An alcohol buzz affects how men objectify women

In underdeveloped countries, this "women's work" equates to finding sources of fuel and collecting water. In more developed nations, the report notes, modern technologies created to assist women domestically - like dishwashers and washing machines - are still out of reach for those under the poverty line.

Taking this burden off of men frees them up to spend more time exercising, playing games and indulging in other leisurely activities, the U.S. Department of Labor acknowledged. Because women are saddled with these extra items on their daily checklists, they not only have less time to relax but less energy and time to devote to growing their careers, leaving them behind the pack when the chance for a promotion arises.

"When you expect women to do all that unpaid work, they don't have the energy or the bandwidth to do that deep, concentrated work in the way that men do," Better Life Lab at New America director Brigid Schulte told CNN.

"So that's robbing women of the ability to be innovators, for economics and companies and societies to take full advantage of women's talents."

STASI: President Trump is terrified of women

Schulte offered two potential solutions to lighten women's loads and spread the work more proportionately. She said that companies and countries can institute or improve upon their family leave policies that keep men in the office and women at home and that couples and families need to discuss how work is divided and come to reasonable agreements.

"Even in countries where the division is so stark," Schulte said, "here could be discussions about how to make things fairer."
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Women are doing double the 'emotional labor' of men

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A new report from the United Nations found that women do an estimated 2.6 times the amount of unpaid work that men do - what equates to " emotional labor."

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Most married couples develop a shared understanding of who does what in their relationship. It is a sometimes unspoken recognition of an inevitable division of labor and responsibilities. The current, commonly agreed, "politically correct" plan for marriage is an equal sharing of chores and other duties; but this plan is not followed now any more than it has been throughout history. In fact, in much of the animal kingdom there is a division of labor which grows inescapably out of different biological imperatives-although here and there in the animal kingdom there are surprising instances of role reversal. Sometimes the male is charged with taking care of the eggs, for instance.

Although there is a division of labor in human affairs between the sexes, there are changing social expectations, which are reflected in somewhat different gender roles at different times. When I grew up, fathers were employed out of the home, and mothers tended to the household. That meant not only housekeeping but taking primary responsibility for child upbringing. Now things are different. Most mothers work. Household responsibilities must be shared. But they are not shared equally. My reading of current expectations in marriage is that men still fix things and take care of the automobiles. Women still have primary responsibility for the proper maintenance of the home and the welfare of the children. If both parents work, for instance, it is more often the mother who takes off time to bring a sick child to the doctor-unless the father's schedule is much more flexible. Most women-although not all-do the cooking and cleaning. Most men-but not all-do the repairs. Men are likely to assemble the furniture, women are likely to find themselves with the task of cleaning it.

I know that some people, particularly women, are likely to object to these seemingly glib caricatures of the various roles women and men play in marriage -and I am not saying that I think this state of affairs is necessarily the way things should be-- but I think these generalizations are still a description of how things actually are. With exceptions, of course. None of these general rules applies to every marriage. The following observations are mine alone and may reflect idiosyncrasies of where I live and work. Currently, it seems to me:

The generalizations I made above are more or less true: men take care of mechanical devices: cars, hi-fi systems, appliances and so on. Women tend to be in charge of decorating the house and making other purchases for the home: choosing drapes and carpets, and, of course, making sure they are clean and cared for properly.

Where a couple lives is still more likely to depend on where the husband works, rather than where the woman works. The man is likely to be better paid.

If someone tosses a ball around with the kids, it is likely to be their father. If the kids need to be driven to activities, it is usually the mother who does the driving. She is also likely to be the one buying clothes for them.

Social arrangements, such as dinner with friends, are likely to be managed by the wife. Wives are more likely to initiate discussions about planned vacations.

All sorts of little tasks fall to one or another of a couple almost by chance and habit. The husband might take out the garbage, do the barbecue and carry packages into the house. The wife might dress the children, make arrangements with the handyman, and call family members.

However, there are other tasks which seem to be up for grabs.

Financial matters: Not long ago, it seemed that husbands were more likely to be in charge of the family finances. Now, I think that either spouse may end up managing the bank account, paying the mortgage and, in general, dealing with a budget-although, often enough, no one is dealing with the budget. It is common now for husbands and wives to have separate checking accounts. Somewhat less common is the practice of some couples of keeping their funds separate. This is especially true if couples are living together, but not yet married.

I am somewhat uncomfortable hearing about such an arrangement. Often I learn about it only when an accusation has been made that someone violated the terms of the agreement. e.g., "I paid the phone bill last month when it was your turn, and I also paid for the hotel rooms, so you should pay a little more of the food bill this month and the dog food." Some of these financial arrangements are very detailed, and it is easy to feel taken advantage of or cheated. The money belongs to both of them in a way, but not in another way. I think there is implicit in such a financial understanding the recognition that there is no real commitment to each other. At least not at that point in time.

It is usually the case that one spouse says "we need this," about a particular expenditure, and the other says, "we can't afford this." Over and over again throughout a marriage, each spouse is likely to take the same position. The person who thinks something-a vacation, a new bathroom-is necessary always thinks what is being considered is necessary, and the other always thinks it is unaffordable. These roles are not gender specific.

Religious matters: It used to be in some places that women took the religion of their future husbands. There are still places in the world where there are rigid rules about these matters. Some religions will not honor a marriage if it takes place outside the church. Nowadays, in this county, the man's wishes are not determinative. Usually, when there are children, the parent who feels most strongly about religion will get the spouse's consent to bring up the child in that person's religion. More commonly, the children are raised-not very seriously-in both religions or in no religion. It is unusual to find two parents who are prepared to marry who feel equally strongly about their particular religion. In fact, over the years I have encountered fewer people who feel strongly about religion in general. In taking a history, I always ask about religion. More people are not affiliated. Some people say, "I am spiritual," which means that they are not religious.

Child rearing practices. No one parent, by virtue of being the mother or the father, has the last word in determining child rearing practices. It can be either; but, usually, one person feels more strongly than the other about discipline and other matters, and that person's opinion is likely to hold sway. Sometimes parents do not come to an understanding about such issues, and ugly confrontations ensue, upsetting the children. Parents who have different attitudes about education are particularly likely to disagree about how much studying a child should do. Children can learn to exploit these differences and become manipulative, which is not in their long-range interest.

Sex There used to be relatively clear-cut attitudes about sex. The man's wishes were what counted. No one believes that anymore; but there is still an expectation in our culture, that the husband should take the lead in initiating sex. But not all the time. Husbands and wives are not likely to start off automatically in agreement about exactly how much sex they would prefer to have. It is not reasonable to expect that two people will want exactly the same amount of anything, whether it is the number of children they should have, or the number of times they should go on vacations, or the number of times they are required to visit in-laws. These differences can be readily compromised if there is good-will; and the same is true for sexual matters. However, it is true, nevertheless, that often one of a couple (and sometimes both) is unhappy with their sexual adjustment. Usually, the discontent centers on having too little sex; and the person who wants to have more sex is just as likely to be the wife as the husband. Some couples seem to adjust to having very little sex, while other couples do not. The level of dissatisfaction often mirrors other dissatisfactions in the marriage.

Who is in charge? There was a time when husbands were in charge. In some areas of the world that is still plainly the case. In fact, in some distant, but more and more familiar places, like Pakistan or Afghanistan, women are not only cast into a submissive role, but are treated as inferiors. But not in Westchester County in the twenty-first century. In most families here no one would claim to be in charge. Even if someone really thought he/she was in charge, it would be considered bad manners to make such a claim.

Looking over the shoulders of so many families, I find it difficult usually to say if one spouse or another is really in charge. Gender roles are shifting and complicated, as described above. One person can be the final word in one sort of issue, like finances, and have little to say about other matters, such as dealing with the children. Still, there are couples whose friends will agree that one person, or the other, is clearly "the boss." I think this is not necessarily a bad thing. Usually, in these cases it is simply that one person feels more strongly about certain things than the other, or is by temperament more passive than the other. If that person makes most of the decisions in family matters, it does not mean that the other person has a lower status. These roles can change, anyway, in the event of illness or some other family emergency.

The individual and more or less arbitrary division of labor in a marriage is not likely to undermine its success. As is always the case, the success of a marriage will depend primarily on mutual respect and affection.

The role of the children The role of the children, of course, is to figure out the computers and tablets, and other arcane devices that seem to appear at brief intervals entirely reconfigured. (c) Fredric Neuman Follow Dr. Neuman's blog at fredricneumanmd.com/blog

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The roles of men and women in marriage have changed over time. But there are still certain functions that fall more to one spouse than another. Certain decisions, however, are as likely to be made by the wife as the husband. I mention some.

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Thinkstock/ Antonio_Diaz

If the household chore gap was merely a matter of men learning how to properly clean a cast-iron pan, it would be relatively easy to remedy. Instead, this gap is largely the product of the hard-to-shake, and deeply embedded, belief that women are responsible for domestic realm. Heart-to-heart conversations with one's partner, charts neatly dividing up who does the laundry and bathes the children, and even progressive paid-leave and childcare policies can only get a couple so far when the world around them views domestic work as women's work. But that world has changed over the past several decades-and a new study shows that the amount of time men and women spend on housework has changed, too.

A team from the University of Oxford looked into changes in the housework gap in 19 countries over the past 50 years and discovered a encouraging movement towards gender equality in every single one. Relying on data from the Multinational Time Use Study, the researchers focused on countries in Western and Eastern Europe, along with the United States, Canada, and Israel, and accounted for a number of variables, including educational attainment, employment, marital status, number of children under the age of 18, and number of children under the age of five. All countries have shown a sharp decline in the gender gap in minutes spent on housework, with (predictably) the Scandinavian countries and (less predictably) the United States leading the way.

The researchers looked only at hours spent cleaning, cooking, and washing clothes, "because these are both the most disliked domestic labour activities and the most traditionally feminine" and therefore "most resistant to change." They believe that the measurement of such activities not only tells us what is going on in people's homes, but also reflects the evolution of gender roles in general and whether the movement towards equality is progressing or, as some claim, stalled.

They found that the time women spend on core housework has largely decreased over the past 50 years, and the time men spend has increased-though not as steeply as the decrease for women. There is more variation in hours spent on housework by women among the different countries studied than by men, likely a product of national policies and ideologies surrounding gender. For example, up until the first decade of the 21st century women in Italy and Spain did far more housework than women in other countries. Italian and Spanish men did less than men in other countries, but the difference wasn't as big.

The researchers also found that the gap in household chore gap persists, and has been shrinking at a slower pace in a number of the countries since the 1990s. In 2011, the last year they looked at, women continue to do, on average, two hours more of housework per day than men. Even when they adjust for a woman's employment status, time spent falls by only ten minutes.

The most important takeaway for the researchers is that while the movement towards equal division of housework has slowed down, it has not stalled. They reject the idea that there is an "absolute ceiling effect" for gender equality and believe instead that further changes to "social policy, management culture, and gender ideology constraints" can help families, and countries, close the gap. This isn't an easy, or quick, solution, but it's one that seems to be working.

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The Household Chore Gap Between Men and Women Is Slowly Shrinking

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If the household chore gap was merely a matter of men learning how to properly clean a cast-iron pan, it would be relatively easy to remedy. Instead, this gap is largely the product of the hard-to-shake, and deeply embedded, belief that women are responsible for domestic realm.

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Women's bodies are a perennial political battleground in the US. This is the only developed country with no universal health coverage and one of only a few with no guaranteed paid maternity leave. Compared to women in Canada or Europe, it's harder for Americans to take time off work to see a doctor, or get affordable child care. When I asked maternal health experts why American women have a shockingly high risk of dying in childbirth, I was told their health just isn't valued here.

Many policies hostile to women's health predate the Trump administration. But President Trump and the Republican-led Congress have made some remarkable moves to reshape women's health law and policy, and curtail hard-fought access to reproductive health care and family planning services.

From rolling back the Obama-era birth control mandate to chipping away at Medicaid, which covers half of all births in this country, to attempting to limit access to abortions, this is not a great moment for women's health.

"There has been a sharp turn from the direction the Obama administration was going into in terms of access to sexual and reproductive health care services," said Alina Salganicoff, vice president and director of women's health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

While some of the administration's efforts have failed or been stopped by federal courts, others are marching ahead - and health advocates are bracing for what might come next.

"In his first year in office, Trump and his administration have brought an ideologically motivated and aggressive campaign against women's sexual and reproductive rights to the White House," said Kinsey Hasstedt, a senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute. "Coming into year two, these lawmakers are very clearly intent on continuing this all-out assault... And there are lots of reasons to be concerned."

The Trump administration's full impact on women's health remains to be seen. But so far, the signals aren't inspiring.

The Trump administration rolled back the birth control mandate

In October, the Trump administration overhauled federal regulations governing the contraceptive coverage guarantee. The long-anticipated rules, which came out of Health and Human Services, relaxed the Obama-era birth control mandate - one of many protections for women's health in the Affordable Care Act - which required employers to offer insurance that covered contraception for women.

Before the mandate, many insurers did not cover contraceptives for women, which often meant they were unaffordable or out of reach. "We saw a giant change in coverage because of the mandate," said Anne Davis, consulting medical director with Physicians for Reproductive Health.

The new Trump-era rules meant companies can now refuse to cover the cost of birth control by seeking religious or moral exemptions - a move that was justified by the false notion that giving women free birth control makes them more promiscuous.

There has been some good news on this front: Two federal courts - one in California and one in Pennsylvania - temporarily blocked the regulations, putting the administration's rules on hold nationwide.

It also means women's health advocates are in a "wait and see pattern," said Hasstedt. "If the new Trump administration [birth control] regulations stand, we have to see how many and what types of employers would avail themselves [of] the new, gaping holes the Trump administration has opened up in the guarantee."

The administration is stacked with people who have taken a hard line on women's reproductive rights

To understand the administration's emphasis on rolling back birth control access and abortion rights, it's important to remember that key positions in the administration - from the White House to HHS - are filled by people who have a track record of anti-abortion legislation and advocacy. Here's a sampling:

Vice President Mike Pence, who restricted access to abortion while he was governor of Indiana, has been called a "one-man crusade" against Planned Parenthood.

Charmaine Yoest, now assistant secretary at HHS, was the president and CEO of the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life.

Valerie Huber, the former president of an abstinence-only education association, is the chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health at HHS.

A top Trump adviser on health care is Katy Talento, an anti-abortion activist who has claimed that side effects of hormonal birth control include cancer and miscarriages.

Matthew Bowman, who worked for the Christian anti-abortion group Alliance Defending Freedom, is now a lawyer at HHS who reportedly helped draft the birth control rollback.

E. Scott Lloyd, director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in Health and Human Services, has a history of anti-abortion activism, even penning an article titled, "Why You Can't Be Pro-Life and Pro-Contraception."

Not surprisingly, the Trump administration's 2018-'22 draft plan for Health and Human Services, which was released in October, for the first time suggested the federal health agency will now be "serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception." (Language about human life starting with conception - the fertilization of an egg - is usually reserved for religious groups and anti-abortion activists, not government documents that will guide federal policy.)

The observers and stakeholders Vox spoke to when the document came out said the language about conception and unborn children signaled a shift at the agency toward faith-based decision-making in health care. They also viewed it as more evidence of the religious right's growing influence at the highest levels of government and Trump's desire to fulfill campaign promises to expand religious freedom.

The administration's ongoing efforts to undermine Medicaid could have detrimental effects on women's health

In the first three years of the ACA, the proportion of uninsured women of reproductive age dropped by 41 percent. While the administration failed to fully repeal the ACA, it has found other ways to undermine the law and curtail the expanded coverage it provided - in particular, by chipping away at Medicaid.

Medicaid is incredibly important for reproductive health: The program for low-income Americans pays for half of all births, including two-thirds of unplanned births. Three-quarters of the public dollars spent on family planning are Medicaid dollars, and in 17 states, Medicaid programs also cover abortion with state dollars.

The ACA repeal-and-replace bills Congress tried to pass last year called for phasing out Medicaid expansion, cutting federal funds for the program, or introducing a block-grant funding system. After those failed, Republicans within the administration have been encouraging states to implement work requirements for the program (which Kentucky has already done and Mississippi is now considering). "So Congress came up short, but the Trump administration is using its executive and its administrative authority to undermine these programs," said Hasstedt.

Making it harder for people to be eligible for Medicaid is expected to result in hundreds of thousands of Americans losing coverage, Vox's Dylan Scott reported. Fewer people on Medicaid means fewer women accessing health and reproductive services that do things like cover cancer screenings, improve access to birth control, and make sure moms and babies have health care throughout a pregnancy and in the months after a baby is born.

Attacking Planned Parenthood remains a priority for social conservatives in Congress

Every bill that Congress considered to roll back the ACA also called for excluding Planned Parenthood affiliates from Medicaid - making good on Trump's campaign promise to defund the group.

If these had passed, they would have meant that a woman who has Medicaid as her health insurance plan couldn't go to Planned Parenthood for her health care and get those services covered. And Planned Parenthood would no longer be able to be reimbursed for these services.

The impact could have been staggering. Three-quarters of the public dollars spent on family planning in this country are Medicaid dollars. And right now 2.5 million people rely on Planned Parenthood for a range of health care services, like birth control and cancer screenings.

Again, excluding funding for Planned Parenthood didn't happen last year. "But it remains a priority for social conservatives in Congress - and a priority for the Trump administration," says Hasstedt. So don't be surprised if we continue to see attacks on Planned Parenthood going forward.

Federal attempts to restrict abortion access have flopped - but there may be more to come

Defunding Planned Parenthood wasn't only way Trump and congressional Republicans sought to limit access to abortions.

On his first days in office, Trump reinstatedand expanded the global gag rule, a law that prevents foreign NGOs that are supported by US funding from promoting or providing abortions. "This has led to defunding groups that even give information about safe abortion," said Dr. Daniel Grossman, director of UC San Francisco's Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health.

More recently, congressional Republicans pushed for the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," a bill that would have made abortion after 20 weeks illegal in every state. As Vox's Anna North explained, the law is based on junk science that suggests a fetus can feel pain. But this week, the Senate blocked the bill - another blow to the efforts to curtail women's rights and reproductive health.

In addition to bills to roll back access to abortion for women, an entire office dedicated to protecting providers who want to refuse to perform abortions also opened up under Trump. Health and Human Services just announced a new "Conscience and Religious Freedom" office to "vigorously uphold the rights of conscience and religious freedom," acting HHS Secretary Eric Hargan recently announced. This was seen as a major victory for the pro-lifers, Vox's Jen Kirby explained, since the move reverses Obama-era rules that barred health care workers from denying coverage for transgender patients or those seeking abortions.

Considering that states have had legislative success in limiting abortion care, a federal government trying to do the same is worrisome, said Davis of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

"Seven states in the US have only one remaining clinic because of clinic closures due to the legislative environment," she added. Again, these efforts predate Trump, but having a president who bragged about addressing the March for Life, and who has anti-abortion advocates in key political and administrative positions, certainly isn't expected to make the situation better.

"In my administration," Trump said in a video address to the marchers, "we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life." He still has three more years to make good on that promise.
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How women's reproductive rights stalled under Trump

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Women's bodies are a perennial political battleground in the US. This is the only developed country with no universal health coverage and one of only a few with no guaranteed paid maternity leave. Compared to women in Canada or Europe, it's harder for Americans to take time off work to see a doctor, or get affordable child care.

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This story was originally posted by member station KQED.
A bipartisan group of more than 140 of some of California's most powerful women - including lawmakers, lobbyists and consultants - are calling out pervasive sexual harassment in politics and across all industries, penning a public letter with one simple message: Enough.

The letter comes a week after revelations that one of Hollywood's most powerful men, Harvey Weinstein, had sexually harassed or abused dozens of women over decades in the movie business - and as thousands of women are sharing their stories of abuse and harassment on social media, with a simple statement: "Me, too."

But Sacramento lobbyist Samantha Corbin, who helped coordinate the letter, said the issue had been percolating at the state Capitol long before the Weinstein controversy broke.

"It elevated conversations that already happened under the radar between women colleagues and friends for years," said Corbin.

"It's a pretty regular thing in Sacramento," she added. "A lot of us are fed up with power dynamics that are not on our side."

Corbin said she and fellow organizers contacted more than 500 women about signing the letter. She noted that many, while supportive, expressed concerns about retaliations by their bosses if they spoke out. She noted that of the women who originally signed the letter, only five are staffers at the state Capitol.

"It's a power dynamic that's difficult even for female lawmakers," Corbin said. "Even for women in the Legislature, men often control fundraising, your ability to get bills passed - even women at the highest levels feel that they're not insulated" from retaliation.

She stressed that many men at the state Capitol have reached out to ask what they can do to help. But Corbin noted, some men are oblivious to sexual harassment, even when it happens right in front of them.

"They don't know what it looks like or how to intervene," Corbin said. "Some of them don't even see what's happening with their own colleagues."

The women leaders write that "millions of Americans were shocked" to learn of Weinstein's behavior.

"We were not. This same kind of inappropriate, sexually harassing behavior cuts across every industry and facet of our society. No matter a woman's age, weight, religion, sexual orientation, race, social status, or position of power, she is not insulated from this behavior. It is pervasive," they wrote.

The letter goes on to detail the ways in which all of the letters' signatories have endured or witnessed "some form of dehumanizing behavior by men with power in our workplaces."

Their list is long and explicit: Groping. Touching. Inappropriate comments about bodies and abilities. Insults and sexual innuendo, frequently disguised as jokes. Promises and threats.

"They have leveraged their power and positions to treat us however they would like," the group wrote, noting that they didn't speak up before out of fear, out of shame.

"Often these men hold our professional fates in their hands. They are bosses, gatekeepers, and contacts. Our relationships with them are crucial to our personal success," they wrote. "We don't want to jeopardize our future, make waves, or be labeled 'crazy,' 'troublemaker,' or 'asking for it.' Worse, we're afraid when we speak up that no one will believe us, or we will be blacklisted."

The signatories include Democrats and Republicans; dozens of lawmakers and other elected officials; lobbyists, political consultants; party leaders. In short, pretty much every sector of California's political world.

They are asking other women to come forward, and have launched a website to collect stories and support one another. And they are demanding that men support them.

"We're done with this," the letter states. "Each of us who signed this op-ed will no longer tolerate the perpetrators or enablers who do. What now? It's time for women to speak up and share their stories. We also need the good men, and there are many, to believe us, have our backs, and speak up. Until more women hold positions of power, our future is literally dependent on men. It's time."

Corbin noted that while some legislators are notorious for their behavior toward women, organizers decided against naming names.

"Even if we had a list of the five worst offenders, it wouldn't do anything," she said. "There's more than five. It's systemic."

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'Enough': California's Women In Politics Call Out Sexual Harassment

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This story was originally posted by member station KQED. A bipartisan group of more than 140 of some of California's most powerful women - including lawmakers, lobbyists and consultants - are calling out pervasive sexual harassment in politics and across all industries, penning a public letter with one simple message: Enough.

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Let's Begin...

Imagine a country where girls must sneak out to go to school, with deadly consequences if they get caught learning. This was Afghanistan under the Taliban, and traces of that danger remain today. 22-year-old Shabana Basij-Rasikh runs a school for girls in Afghanistan. She celebrates the power of a family's decision to believe in their daughters -- and tells the story of one brave father who stood up to local threats. (Filmed at TEDxWomen)

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Dare to educate Afghan girls - Shabana Basij-Rasikh

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Imagine a country where girls must sneak out to go to school, with deadly consequences if they get caught learning. This was Afghanistan under the Taliban, and traces of that danger remain today. 22-year-old Shabana Basij-Rasikh runs a school for girls in Afghanistan.

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Women and men are not equal. The clearest indication of this is the gender wage gap, which has barely budged in a decade. Women are paid, on average, about 78 percent of what men are paid.

But often, gender inequality is less overt than that. Sexism and objectification of the female body is rampant in popular songs and advertisements. Little girls are usually given dolls or stuffed animals, while little boys are usually given Legos or video games. In science class, we learn about the contributions of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, but we rarely learn about the impact of female scientists such as Hypatia or Rosalind Franklin. From an early age, girls learn that they are not expected by society to become scientists, engineers, innovators, or leaders. As a result, women are drastically underrepresented in leadership positions as well as the STEM fields.

Women's organizations on college campuses seek to rectify this gender imbalance. Harvard's own campus boasts a wide range of women's organizations, including Women in Business, Women in Science, Women's Initiative in Leadership, and Women in Computer Science. These are just a handful of the women's organizations on Harvard's campus. But among the long list of "Women in __" organizations, there are a few that are missing: Women in Nursing, Women in Caretaking, Women in Secretarial Duties, and Women in Teaching.

The names of the existing women's organizations on campus make it seem as though the two are mutually exclusive: women and science, for example, or women in leadership. It suggests that women do not belong in these groups intrinsically, and need a specific support system to guide them to success in a field in which men are more inherently suited. On the one hand, this is understandable. Science, business, computer science-these are all fields from which women have traditionally been excluded. Only recently have women begun to enter these industries, and even now, women are still drastically underrepresented. Furthermore, there are many barriers and stigmas preventing women from pursuing traditionally male-dominated industries: not only unspoken rules, such as which toys are suitable for each gender, but also blatant discrimination in the education system and in the professional world that often discourages females from even trying to pursue a career in business, science, technology, engineering, math, or any leadership position.

But if we want to change this, then we have to stop perpetuating the myth of gender roles entirely. And that means helping men and women overcome the stifling confines of societal dictations of what to do and what not to do. Women's groups on campus only enhance a gender-based segregation that they are fighting to overcome. There will never be a Women in Nursing club simply because nursing and caretaking is a traditionally female endeavor. However, these separations actually make gender-based differences ever more salient, thereby worsening the problem rather than alleviating it. Though the intentions of these clubs may be positive-helping women break into industries that are traditionally male-dominated-people come to interpret them in a much different light.

The existence of women's groups such as Women in Science and Women in Business seems to imply that women are better at caretaking and supportive roles, and that men are better at less "emotional" tasks such as working in a lab or running a business. This only feeds into preexisting gender roles-gender roles that are contributing to the oppression of women that these groups are seeking to undermine. Furthermore, these gender roles are pigeonholing both men and women into career paths and even personality traits that are overly deterministic and simplistic. It is too simple to say that men are better at math and science, and that women are better at nursing and teaching.

These stereotypes hurt women by preventing them from pursuing careers in STEM, but they also hurt men. They hurt men by making society frown upon men who choose more "feminine" roles such as caretaking, nursing, or teaching. They hurt men by making society see men who are more caring or emotional as "pussies." They hurt men by forcing them to fit into the predetermined idea of what a man "should" be-authoritative, forceful, unemotional, and stoic-at the same time that it hurts women by forcing them to fit into a predetermined idea of what a woman "should" be: housemaker, caretaker, supportive, and gentle. It is important to realize that women's groups, despite their positive intentions, are only further perpetrating a system of gender roles that hurt both men and women.

So how should we proceed? The primary argument in support of women's groups is a perfectly valid one: aspiring young female leaders, or businesswomen, or engineers would benefit from seeing strong successful female role models. But why should men also not benefit from hearing successful women leaders or businesswomen or scientists speak? Why should men only have male role models, while females only have female role models? The premise that women's groups are built upon is flawed. Women's groups on campus focus on helping female students overcome limitations that they traditionally face in professional settings such as public speaking, making presentations, portraying yourself as "confident," and the like. But these support systems should not be gender-specific.

Women's groups on campus currently hold discussions and events that are open to all genders, but the vast majority of those who attend their events are people who identify as female. Why? Presumably because those who identify as male have joined groups that are labeled "Aspiring Future Scientists" rather than "Women in Science." Why are there two different clubs for aspiring scientists, anyway? It seems to imply that women need extra "help," since they are not intrinsically suited to become a scientist the same way a man is. I think we can all agree that that is not true. A woman is just as fit as a man, given similar educational and pre-professional opportunities and equal treatment by society, to become a scientist, engineer, or mathematician. So then why are there two separate groups, if they are aiming for the same thing? The segregation of "women's groups" and "everyone-else groups" seems to suggest a difference in treatment-perhaps that they are preparing their members for different roles within those industries.

I hope not. I hope that women are being prepared for the same roles as men in any industry, be it science and engineering, or nursing and teaching. And I hope that men are being prepared for the same roles as women. I hope that anyone of either sex would be able to aspire to the same goal, to the same role models. As a result, I think pre-professional groups on campus should not be gender-specific at all. I believe male students would also benefit from seeing female role models. If anything, I think they would benefit even more. By seeing strong female leaders and engineers and scientists, aspiring young men will be more inclined to respect their female peers and learn to see them as their colleagues and leaders. Therefore, we should integrate the pre-professional groups on campus and bring both sexes together so aspiring female and male students alike can benefit from seeing strong and successful female and male leaders, engineers, scientists, nurses, teachers, etc. And in the end, isn't that what feminism is all about?
Image credit: Flickr

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If We Want Equality, Then We Must Stop Perpetuating Gender Roles

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Women and men are not equal. The clearest indication of this is the gender wage gap, which has barely budged in a decade. Women are paid, on average, about 78 percent of what men are paid. But often, gender inequality is less overt than that.

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Under the banner of free speech, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been host to rape videos and revenge porn-which makes female users feel anything but free.

Illustrations by Jackie Lay

In December 2012, an Icelandic woman named Thorlaug Agustsdottir discovered a Facebook group called "Men are better than women." One image she found there, Thorlaug wrote to us this summer in an email, "was of a young woman naked chained to pipes or an oven in what looked like a concrete basement, all bruised and bloody. She looked with a horrible broken look at whoever was taking the pic of her curled up naked." Thorlaug wrote an outraged post about it on her own Facebook page.

Before long, a user at "Men are better than women" posted an image of Thorlaug's face, altered to appear bloody and bruised. Under the image, someone commented, "Women are like grass, they need to be beaten/cut regularly." Another wrote: "You just need to be raped." Thorlaug reported the image and comments to Facebook and requested that the site remove them.

"We reviewed the photo you reported," came Facebook's auto reply, "but found it does not violate Facebook's Community Standards on hate speech, which includes posts or photos that attack a person based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or medical condition."

Instead, the Facebook screeners labeled the content "Controversial Humor." Thorlaug saw nothing funny about it. She worried the threats were real.

Some 50 other users sent their own requests on her behalf. All received the same reply. Eventually, on New Year's Eve, Thorlaug called the local press, and the story spread from there. Only then was the image removed.

In January 2013, Wired published a critical account of Facebook's response to these complaints. A company spokesman contacted the publication immediately to explain that Facebook screeners had mishandled the case, conceding that Thorlaug's photo "should have been taken down when it was reported to us." According to the spokesman, the company tries to address complaints about images on a case-by-case basis within 72 hours, but with millions of reports to review every day, "it's not easy to keep up with requests." The spokesman, anonymous to Wired readers, added, "We apologize for the mistake."

* * *

If, as the communications philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, television brought the brutality of war into people's living rooms, the Internet today is bringing violence against women out of it. Once largely hidden from view, this brutality is now being exposed in unprecedented ways. In the words of Anne Collier, co-director of ConnectSafely.org and co-chair of the Obama administration's Online Safety and Technology Working Group, "We are in the middle of a global free speech experiment." On the one hand, these online images and words are bringing awareness to a longstanding problem. On the other hand, the amplification of these ideas over social media networks is validating and spreading pathology.

We, the authors, have experienced both sides of the experiment firsthand. In 2012, Soraya, who had been reporting on gender and women's rights, noticed that more and more of her readers were contacting her to ask for media attention and help with online threats. Many sent graphic images, and some included detailed police reports that had gone nowhere. A few sent videos of rapes in progress. When Soraya wrote about these topics, she received threats online. Catherine, meanwhile, received warnings to back up while reporting on the cover-up of a sexual assault.

All of this raised a series of troubling questions: Who's proliferating this violent content? Who's controlling its dissemination? Should someone be? In theory, social media companies are neutral platforms where users generate content and report content as equals. But, as in the physical world, some users are more equal than others. In other words, social media is more symptom than disease: A 2013 report from the World Health Organization called violence against women "a global health problem of epidemic proportion," from domestic abuse, stalking, and street harassment to sex trafficking, rape, and murder. This epidemic is thriving in the petri dish of social media.

While some of the aggression against women online occurs between people who know one another, and is unquestionably illegal, most of it happens between strangers. Earlier this year, Pacific Standard published a long story by Amanda Hess about an online stalker who set up a Twitter account specifically to send her death threats.

Across websites and social media platforms, everyday sexist comments exist along a spectrum that also includes illicit sexual surveillance, " creepshots," extortion, doxxing, stalking, malicious impersonation, threats, and rape videos and photographs. The explosive use of the Internet to conduct human trafficking also has a place on this spectrum, given that three-quarters of trafficked people are girls and women.

A report, "Misogyny on Twitter," released by the research and policy organization Demos this June, found more than 6 million instances of the word "slut" or "whore" used in English on Twitter between December 26, 2013, and February 9, 2014. (The words "bitch" and "cunt" were not measured.) An estimated 20 percent of the misogyny study Tweets appeared, to researchers, to be threatening. An example: "@XXX @XXX You stupid ugly fucking slut I'll go to your flat and cut your fucking head off you inbred whore."

A second Demos study showed that while male celebrities, female journalists, and male politicians face the highest likelihood of online hostility, women are significantly more likely to be targeted specifically because of their gender, and men are overwhelmingly those doing the harassing. For women of color, or members of the LGBT community, the harassment is amplified. "In my five years on Twitter, I've been called 'nigger' so many times that it barely registers as an insult anymore," explains attorney and legal analyst Imani Gandy. "Let's just say that my 'nigger cunt' cup runneth over."

At this summer's VidCon, an annual nationwide convention held in Southern California, women vloggers shared an astonishing number of examples. The violent threats posted beneath YouTube videos, they observed, are pushing women off of this and other platforms in disproportionate numbers. When Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter to help fund a feminist video series called Tropes vs. Women, she became the focus of a massive and violently misogynistic cybermob. Among the many forms of harassment she endured was a game where thousands of players "won" by virtually bludgeoning her face. In late August, she contacted the police and had to leave her home after she received a series of serious violent online threats.

Danielle Keats Citron, law professor at the University of Maryland and author of the recently released book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, explained, "Time and time again, these women have no idea often who it is attacking them. A cybermob jumps on board, and one can imagine that the only thing the attackers know about the victim is that she's female." Looking at 1,606 cases of "revenge porn," where explicit photographs are distributed without consent, Citron found that 90 percent of targets were women. Another study she cited found that 70 percent of female gamers chose to play as male characters rather than contend with sexual harassment.

This type of harassment also fills the comment sections of popular websites. In August, employees of the largely female-staffed website Jezebel published an open letter to the site's parent company, Gawker, detailing the professional, physical, and emotional costs of having to look at the pornographic GIFs maliciously populating the site's comments sections everyday. "It's like playing whack-a-mole with a sociopathic Hydra," they wrote, insisting that Gawker develop tools for blocking and tracking IP addresses. They added, "It's impacting our ability to do our jobs."

For some, the costs are higher. In 2010, 12-year-old Amanda Todd bared her chest while chatting online with a person who'd assured her that he was a boy, but was in fact a grown man with a history of pedophilia. For the next two years, Amanda and her mother, Carol Todd, were unable to stop anonymous users from posting that image on sexually explicit pages. A Facebook page, labeled "Controversial Humor," used Amanda's name and image-and the names and images of other girls-without consent. In October 2012, Amanda committed suicide, posting a YouTube video that explained her harassment and her decision. In April 2014, Dutch officials announced that they had arrested a 35-year-old man suspected to have used the Internet to extort dozens of girls, including Amanda, in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The suspect now faces charges of child pornography, extortion, criminal harassment, and Internet luring.

Almost immediately after Amanda shared her original image, altered versions appeared on pages, and videos proliferated. One of the pages was filled with pictures of naked pre-pubescent girls, encouraging them to drink bleach and die. While she appreciates the many online tributes honoring her daughter, Carol Todd is haunted by "suicide humor" and pornographic content now forever linked to her daughter's image. There are web pages dedicated to what is now called "Todding." One of them features a photograph of a young woman hanging.

Meanwhile, extortion of other victims continues. In an increasing number of countries, rapists are now filming their rapes on cell phones so they can blackmail victims out of reporting the crimes. In August, after a 16-year-old Indian girl was gang-raped, she explained, "I was afraid. While I was being raped, another man pointed a gun and recorded me with his cellphone camera. He said he will upload the film on the Net if I tell my family or the police."

In Pakistan, the group Bytes for All-an organization that previously sued the government for censoring YouTube videos-released a study showing that social media and mobile tech are causing real harm to women in the country. Gul Bukhari, the report's author, told Reuters, "These technologies are helping to increase violence against women, not just mirroring it."

In June 2014, a 16-year-old girl named Jada was drugged and raped at a party in Texas. Partygoers posted a photo of her lying unconscious, one leg bent back. Soon, other Internet users had turned it into a meme, mocking her pose and using the hashtag #jadapose. Kasari Govender, executive director of the Vancouver-based West Coast Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), calls this kind of behavior "cybermisogyny." "Cyberbullying," she says, "has become this term that's often thrown around with little understanding. We think it's important to name the forces that are motivating this in order to figure out how to address it."

In an unusually bold act, Jada responded by speaking publicly about her rape and the online abuse that followed. Supporters soon took to the Internet in her defense. "There's no point in hiding," she told a television reporter. "Everybody has already seen my face and my body, but that's not what I am and who I am. I'm just angry."

* * *

After Facebook removed Thorlaug's altered image and the rape threats, she felt relieved, but she was angry too. "These errors are going to manifest again," she told Wired, "if there isn't clear enough policy."

Yet, at the time of Thorlaug's report, Facebook did have a clear policy. Its detailed Community Standards for speech, often considered the industry's gold standard, were bolstered by reporting tools that allowed users to report offensive content, and Thorlaug had used these tools as instructed. But serious errors were still manifesting regularly.

Not long after Thorlaug's struggle to remove her image, a Facebook user posted a video documenting the gang rape of a woman by the side of a road in Malaysia. The six minutes of graphic footage were live for more than three weeks, during which Facebook moderators declined repeated requests for removal. It had been viewed hundreds of times before a reader of Soraya's forwarded the video to her with a request for help. We notified a contact on Facebook's Safety Advisory Board, and only then was the video taken offline.

Around the same time, another Icelandic woman, Hildur Lilliendahl Viggósdóttir, decided to draw attention to similar problems by creating a page called "Men who hate women," where she reposted examples of misogyny she found elsewhere on Facebook. Her page was suspended four times -not because of its offensive content, but because she was reposting images without written permission. Meanwhile, the original postings-graphically depicting rape and glorifying the physical abuse of women-remained on Facebook. As activists had been noting for years, pages like these were allowed by Facebook to remain under the category of "humor." Other humorous pages live at the time had names like "I kill bitches like you," "Domestic Violence: Don't Make Me Tell You Twice," "I Love the Rape Van," and "Raping Babies Because You're Fucking Fearless."

* * *

Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is one of many civil libertarians who believe Facebook and other social media platforms should not screen this, or any, content at all. "It of course must be noted that the company-like any company-is well within its rights to regulate speech as it sees fit," she wrote in a May 2013 piece in Slate in response to growing activism. "The question is not can Facebook censor speech, but rather, should it?" She argues that censoring any content "sets a dangerous precedent for special interest groups looking to bring their pet issue to the attention of Facebook's censors."

When the problem involves half the world's population, it's difficult to classify it as a "pet issue." What's more, there are free speech issues on both sides of the regulated content equation. "We have the expressive interests of the harassers to threaten, to post photos, to spread defamation, rape threats, lies on the one hand," explains Citron. "And on the other hand you have the free speech interests, among others, of the victims, who are silenced and are driven offline."

These loss-of-speech issues tend to draw less attention and sympathy than free speech rights. However, as Citron points out, sexual hostility has already been identified as a source of real harm: Title VII demands that employers regulate such hostility in the workplace. These policies exist, Citron says, because sexual hostility "is understood as conduct interfering with life opportunities."

For online harassers, this is often an overt goal: to silence female community members, whether through sexual slurs or outright threats. It's little surprise that the Internet has become a powerful tool in intimate partner violence: A 2012 survey conducted by the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) found that 89 percent of local domestic violence programs reported victims who were experiencing technology-enabled abuse, often across multiple platforms.

For their part, social media companies often express commitment to user safety, but downplay their influence on the broader culture. Administrators repeatedly explain that their companies, while very concerned with protecting users, are not in the business of policing free speech. As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone phrased it in a post titled "Tweets Must Flow," "We strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content." The company's guidelines encourage readers to unfollow the offensive party and "express your feelings [to a trusted friend] so you can move on."

None of this was of much help to Caroline Criado-Perez, a British journalist and feminist who helped get a picture of Jane Austen on the £10 banknote. The day Bank of England made the announcement, Criado-Perez began receiving more than 50 violent threats per hour on Twitter. "The immediate impact was that I couldn't eat or sleep," she told The Guardian in 2013. She asked Twitter to find some way to stop the threats, but at the time the company offered no mechanism for reporting abuse. Since then, the company has released a reporting button, but its usefulness is extremely limited: It requires that every tweet be reported separately, a cumbersome process that gives the user no way of explaining that she is a target of ongoing harassment. (The system currently provides no field for comments.)

And yet companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube do moderate content and make quasi-governmental decisions regarding speech. Some content moderation is related to legal obligations, as in the case of child pornography, but a great deal more is a matter of cultural interpretation. Companies have disclosed that governments rely on them to implement censorship requests-earlier this year, for example, Twitter blocked tweets and accounts deemed "blasphemous" by the Pakistani government. (In response to these government incursions, a coalition of academics, legal scholars, corporations, non-profit organizations, and schools came together in 2008 to form the Global Network Initiative, a non-governmental organization dedicated to privacy and free expression.)

When it comes to copyright and intellectual property interests, companies are highly responsive, as Hildur's "Men who hate women" experience highlighted. But, says Jan Moolman, who coordinates the Association of Progressive Communications's women's rights division, "'garden variety' violence against women-clearly human rights violations-frequently get a lukewarm response until it becomes an issue of bad press."

For that reasons, when social media companies fail to respond to complaints and requests, victims of online harassment frequently turn to individuals who can publicize their cases. Trista Hendren, an Oregon-based blogger, became an advocate for other women after readers from Iceland, Egypt, Australia, India, Lebanon, and the UK began asking her to write about their experiences. "I was overwhelmed," she told us. In December 2012, Hendren and several collaborators created a Facebook page called RapeBook where users could flag and report offensive content that the company had refused to take down.

By April 2013, people were using RapeBook to post pictures of women and pre-pubescent girls being raped or beaten. Some days, Hendren received more than 500 anonymous, explicitly violent comments-"I will skull-fuck your children," for instance. Facebook users tracked down and posted her address, her children's names, and her phone number and started to call her.

By that time, Hendren had abandoned any hope that using Facebook's reporting mechanisms could help her. She was able, however, to work directly with a Facebook moderator to address the threats and criminal content. She found that the company sincerely wanted to help. Their representatives discussed the posts with her on a case-by-case basis, but more violent and threatening posts kept coming, and much of the content she considered graphic and abusive was allowed to remain.

Eventually, Hendren told us, she and Facebook became locked in disagreement over what constituted "safety" and "hate" on the site. Facebook's people, she said, told her they didn't consider the threats to her and her family credible or legitimate. Hendren, however, was concerned enough to contact the police and the FBI. The FBI started an investigation; meanwhile Hendren, physically and emotionally spent, suspended her Facebook account. "I was the sickest I have ever been," she said. "It was really disgusting work. We just began to think, 'Why are we devoting all our efforts on a volunteer basis to do work that Facebook-with billions of dollars-should be taking care of?'"

Hendren contacted Soraya, who continued to press Facebook directly. At the same time, Soraya and Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, also began comparing notes on what readers were sending them. Bates was struck by surprising ad placements. At the time, a photo captioned "The bitch didn't know when to shut up" appeared alongside ads for Dove and iTunes. "Domestic Violence: Don't Make Me Tell You Twice"-a page filled with photos of women beaten, bruised, and bleeding-was populated by ads for Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg's new bestselling book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

In early May, Bates decided to tweet at one of these companies. "Hi @Finnair here's your ad on another domestic violence page-will you stop advertising with Facebook?" FinnAir responded immediately: "It is totally against our values and policies. Thanks @r2ph! @everydaysexism Could you send us the URL please so that we can take action?"

Soraya, Bates, and Jaclyn Friedman, the executive director of Women, Action, and Media, a media justice advocacy group, joined forces and launched a social media campaign designed to attract advertisers' attention. The ultimate goal was to press Facebook to recognize explicit violence against women as a violation of its own prohibitions against hate speech, graphic violence, and harassment. Within a day of beginning the campaign, 160 organizations and corporations had co-signed a public letter, and in less than a week, more than 60,000 tweets were shared using the campaign's #FBrape hashtag. Nissan was the first company to pull its advertising dollars from Facebook altogether. More than 15 others soon followed. The letter emphasized that Facebook's refusal to take down content that glorified and trivialized graphic rape and domestic violence was actually hampering free expression-it was "marginaliz[ing] girls and women, sidelin[ing] our experiences and concerns, and contribut[ing] to violence against us."

On May 28, Facebook issued a public response:

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 ... 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.

* * *

For all its shortcomings, Facebook is doing more than most companies to address online aggression against women. Cindy Southworth, vice president of development and innovation at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, has served on Facebook's Safety Advisory Board since 2010. "[My organization] gets calls from Google, Twitter, Microsoft-but Facebook and Airbnb are the only ones who've put us on an advisory board," she told us.

This is huge progress, she says. By inviting experts who understand the roots of violence against women and children and are familiar with emerging strategies to prevent it, tech is more likely to innovate improvements. The once profusely applied "Controversial Humor" label in Facebook is no longer in use. The company now officially recognizes gender-based hate as a legitimate concern, and its representatives continue to work closely with advocates like Southworth and the coalition that formed during the #FBRape campaign. There are ongoing efforts to improve user safety and identify content that is threatening, harassing, hateful, or discriminatory.

Southworth calls the company's representatives "thoughtful, passionate, concerned, and straddling the line between free speech and safety." But, sometimes, progress feels slow. "The teams who handle these cases are just swamped," she explained.

When Emily Bazelon, author of a book and a March 2013 Atlantic story about Internet bullies, visited Facebook's headquarters, the young men she saw working as moderators were spending roughly 30 seconds assessing each reported post, millions of reports a week. Outsourced speech moderation has become a booming industry. Like Facebook's own moderation process, the operations of these companies are opaque by design.

TaskUs, with bases in Santa Monica, California, and several locations in the Philippines, provides moderation for iPhone and Android apps such as Whisper, Secret, and Yik Yak. The company advertises "a bulletproof system to ensure that no one-not a single person-is hurt physically or mentally by the actions of another user in an anonymous app community." Yet TaskUs doesn't disclose its standards of speech, its hiring practices, its training process, or working conditions. "Unfortunately," we were told when we inquired, "we're bound by confidentiality from discussing details of process including hiring and training. We can speak generally about how we handle the moderation process but our clients are not comfortable with us exposing anything proprietary (and they consider the moderation and training processes proprietary)."

While private companies protect their practices, nonprofits like The Internet Watch Foundation don't. IWF, based in Cambridge, England, screens images of child sexual abuse for Facebook, Google, and Virgin Media, among others. IWF staff watch, analyze, categorize, and report abusive images-70 percent of them involve children under 10. Data collected by police across England and Wales in 2012 suggest that 150 million child pornography images were in distribution in the UK alone that year. By comparison, in 1995, when the reach of the Internet was far narrower, only about 7,000 child pornography images were in online circulation.

IWF's analysts see everything, said Heidi Kempster, IWF's director of business affairs, during a conversation this summer. Kempster was candid about IWF's business practices: The group screens rigorously during its hiring processes, conducting psychological interviews that establish everything from family history and relationship-building skills to views on pornography. The company also requires monthly individual counseling and quarterly group counseling, as well as expert consultation-with police, attorneys, or judges- and breaks as needed. IWF analysts, said Kempster, "look at shocking and violent images all day every day. There are days that are tough. They have to take time out."

Over the past two years, Facebook has taken steps to improve its reporting system. Matt Steinfeld, a spokesperson for Facebook, spoke to us about Facebook's Compassion Research, a bullying prevention project developed in conjunction with Yale's Center for Emotional Intelligence. The tools developed through this program have more than tripled the rate at which users send a message directly to the person who posted the offensive material, asking for the removal of photos or comments. Now, in 85 percent of those requests, the person who posted the photo takes the photo down or sends a reply.

Still, the company hasn't yet come up with a reliable approach for dealing with the other 15 percent of cases. "We've always recognized that there is going to be content that won't be moderated through compassion tools," said Steinfeld. "We're not going to tell the people who is right and who is wrong."

The opacity maintained around moderation means sites are not obligated to honor the reports they receive and any decision to remove content can be legitimized, as Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research and MIT, and Tarleton Gillespie at Cornell University, observed in an August study on social media reporting tools. In other words, "given that flags remain open to interpretation and can be gamed, they can also be explained away when the site prefers to ignore them."

In conversations this summer, Matt Steinfeld, a spokesperson for Facebook, maintained that his own company's standards are clearly defined. "There's this misconception that there's an algorithm," he said during one conversation in July, "but there's a human who's given objective standards" for responding to individual complaints.

When we spoke with Microsoft's Crawford about her research, she described the limitations of these seemingly objective standards. "The flag is being asked to do too much," she said. "It's a fundamentally narrow mechanism: the technical version of 'I object.' And while some platforms claim that flags are 'objective' data about which content to remove, they are part of a profoundly human decision-making process about what constitutes appropriate speech in the public domain."

Researchers and industry experts are beginning to consider the effects of that context. Ninety percent of tech employees are men. At the most senior levels, that number goes up to 96 percent. Eight-nine percent of startup leadership teams are all male. Google recently announced that it is implementing programs to, in the words of a New York Times report, "fight deep-set cultural biases and an insidious frat-house attitude that pervades the tech business." A computer simulation used by the company illustrated how an industry-wide 1-percent bias against women in performance evaluations might have led to the significant absence of women in senior positions.

Many Silicon Valley leaders-such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who recently acknowledged a "leadership crisis" among women in tech-have been investing in programs they hope will encourage girls to enter, and remain, in STEM fields. However, the fact that companies better understand the need to encourage girls and women doesn't necessarily mean they're welcomed. Despite the presence of visible, active and prominent women in the industry, according to one recent study, 56 percent of the women who do enter tech leave the industry, frequently stating that they were pushed out by sexism. This attrition rate is twice that of their male peers. As Vivek Wadha, author Innovating Women, recently pointed out, only 2.7 percent of 6,517 companies that received venture funding from 2011 to 2013 had female chief executives.

It's not hard to imagine how unconscious biases might affect systems architecture, including the ways companies handle moderation requests. It is notable that Ello, a new ad-free social network, launched without private profiles, a block button, or a reporting mechanism. (After much criticism, those features were added.) Its designers appear to be seven young white men whose features, appearing on the beta website, are obscured by smiley faces. The Ello site reads, "We reserve the right to enforce or not to enforce these rules in whatever way we see fit, at our sole discretion. According to our lawyer, we should also tell you that Ello's rules and policies do not create a duty or contractual obligation for us to act in any particular manner. And we reserve the right to change these rules at any time. So please play nice, be respectful, and have fun."

* * *

Sandy Garossino, a former British Columbia prosecutor who has worked on dozens of cases of cyber extortion and online child pornography, is concerned about the implications of today's industry practices and policies, not only for children but for adults. "Right now, the slightest calibrations are going to have a profound effect on the future," she told us.

In late June, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear the case of Anthony Elonis, a man with five charges of sexual harassment, who was imprisoned after threatening to kill his wife on Facebook. Elonis insists that his Facebook posts were not real threats but protected speech. Tara Elonis, his estranged wife-possibly aware that most female murder victims are killed by intimate partners-said that there was nothing unthreatening about her husband's Facebook posts and that they forced her to take necessary, costly precautions. "If I only knew then what I know now," read one, "I would have smothered your ass with a pillow, dumped your body in the back seat, dropped you off in Toad Creek, and made it look like a rape and murder."

"Although threats are traditional categories of excluded speech," explains First Amendment legal scholar Susan Williams, "there is very little take on actually defining what a true threat is in constitutional terms." This lack of definition is what plagues social media companies seeking scalable solutions for moderating content and keeping users safe. Following legal precedent they, too, avoid defining what makes a comment a threat and instead home in on whether or not there's one specific target. However, as Williams explains, "threats can be one of those environmental factors that reduce the autonomy of whole classes of persons."

In a recent high-profile case, intimate photographs of 100 celebrities-all of whom were women-were stolen and shared without consent. Google is now facing the possibility of a $100 million lawsuit, brought by over a dozen of the women whose privacy was violated, for refusing to remove the stolen photographs. In a letter dated October 1, the women's attorneys wrote that "Google has exhibited the lowest standards of ethical business conduct, and has acted dishonorably by perpetrating unlawful activity that exemplifies an utter lack of respect for women and privacy. Google's 'Don't be evil' motto is a sham."

In response, Google removed tens of thousands of the hacked celebrity photographs. Meanwhile, social media companies have been far less responsive to similar demands from ordinary citizens. "Hey @google, what about my photos?" tweeted revenge porn victim Holly Jacobs in the aftermath of the celebrity scandal. It remains to be seen how the courts will rule in the case of Meryam Ali, a Houston woman who filed a $123 million lawsuit against Facebook for failing to remove a false profile that showed her face superimposed on pornographic images. As writer Roxanne Gay poignantly observed in The Guardian, "What these people are doing is reminding women that, no matter who they are, they are still women. They are forever vulnerable."

In late August, Drew Curtis, founder of the content aggregator FARK, announced that the company had added "misogyny" to its moderation guidelines. FARK no longer allows rape jokes or threats. It also prohibited posts that call groups of women "whores" or "sluts," or suggest that a woman who suffered a crime is somehow asking for it. In a note to readers, Curtis wrote, "This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large Internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary." Responding in , Amanda Hess praised FARK's new policy but also pointed out its limitations: Just underneath his announcement, users posted dozens of comments about rape, whores, and "boobies."

Announcements like FARK's are important, particularly for catalyzing discussion, but policy changes alone can't solve such a complex problem. Kate Crawford of MIT and Microsoft urges tech innovators to think about solutions "as pluralistically as possible." She'd like to see more platforms develop systems that leave traces of when and why content has been removed or modified-an approach in play at Wikipedia, for instance.

Other experts agree that companies have a responsibility to provide greater transparency. They also need to dedicate more staff to understanding and performing moderation. They need to attract and retain female engineers, programmers, and managers. They need to invite experts in violence prevention to their tables. Whether online or off, there seems to be an increasing consensus, from the NFL to the White House, that misogyny requires a broad societal response. As President Obama put it in mid-September, "It is on all of us to reject the quiet tolerance of sexual assault and to refuse to accept what's unacceptable."

Soon after Hess's piece appeared on Slate, a reader posted it on a FARK message board and users filled the comment thread mocking the policy and discussing the best way slip a thermometer into Hess. So far, that thread has not been removed. As Hess herself put it, "Policing misogyny is fabulous in theory. In practice, it's a bitch."

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The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women

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Under the banner of free speech, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been host to rape videos and revenge porn-which makes female users feel anything but free. In December 2012, an Icelandic woman named Thorlaug Agustsdottir discovered a Facebook group called "Men are better than women."

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She received the annual Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement.

Oprah Winfrey was the recipient of the Golden Globes' annual Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement, and gave a powerful acceptance speech during Sunday night's ceremony. She was introduced by Reese Witherspoon, who compared their time together on the set of A Wrinkle in Time to a master class at Harvard Business School and a spiritual retreat all in one. "Oprah's hugs could end wars, solve world peace," Witherspoon joked.

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Once Winfrey took the stage, she delivered an inspirational, uplifting speech which discussed race and gender and the fight for equality. She also told the story of Recy Taylor, a woman who fought for justice in the Jim Crow era after she was raped. "For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men," Winfrey said, bringing the audience to its feet. "But their time is up. Their time is up."

Read the full transcript here:

"Thank you, Reese. In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother's house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history:" The winner is Sidney Poitier." Up to the stage came the most elegant man I ever remembered. His tie was white, his skin was black-and he was being celebrated. I'd never seen a black man being celebrated like that. I tried many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone tired from cleaning other people's houses. But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation in Sidney's performance in Lilies of the Field: "Amen, amen, amen, amen."

In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B. DeMille award right here at the Golden Globes and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award. It is an honor-it is an honor and it is a privilege to share the evening with all of them and also with the incredible men and women who have inspired me, who challenged me, who sustained me and made my journey to this stage possible. Dennis Swanson who took a chance on me for A.M. Chicago. Saw me on the show and said to Steven Spielberg, she's Sophia in 'The Color Purple.' Gayle who's been a friend and Stedman who's been my rock.

I want to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. We know the press is under siege these days. We also know it's the insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth that keeps us from turning a blind eye to corruption and to injustice. To-to tyrants and victims, and secrets and lies. I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times, which brings me to this: what I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have. And I'm especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories. Each of us in this room are celebrated because of the stories that we tell, and this year we became the story.

But it's not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It's one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics, or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They're the women whose names we'll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they're in academia, engineering, medicine, and science. They're part of the world of tech and politics and business. They're our athletes in the Olympics and they're our soldiers in the military.

And there's someone else, Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know, too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she'd attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasn't an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.

Their time is up. And I just hope-I just hope that Recy Taylor died knowing that her truth, like the truth of so many other women who were tormented in those years, and even now tormented, goes marching on. It was somewhere in Rosa Parks' heart almost 11 years later, when she made the decision to stay seated on that bus in Montgomery, and it's here with every woman who chooses to say, "Me too." And every man-every man who chooses to listen.

In my career, what I've always tried my best to do, whether on television or through film, is to say something about how men and women really behave. To say how we experience shame, how we love and how we rage, how we fail, how we retreat, persevere, and how we overcome. I've interviewed and portrayed people who've withstood some of the ugliest things life can throw at you, but the one quality all of them seem to share is an ability to maintain hope for a brighter morning, even during our darkest nights. So I want all the girls watching here, now, to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say 'Me too' again."

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Here's the Full Transcript of Oprah's Inspirational Golden Globes Speech

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She received the annual Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement. Oprah Winfrey was the recipient of the Golden Globes' annual Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement, and gave a powerful acceptance speech during Sunday night's ceremony.

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Reece Witherspoon Woman of the Year full speech - Ambition is not a dirty word!

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Tips to look after your husband printed in the 1950s 😂

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In 1989, most Americans had never even heard of gay marriage, and certainly couldn't conceive that it would one day be legalized by popular vote. That year, Andrew Sullivan wrote a landmark essay for the New Republic, "Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage." Sullivan's essay is one of the most important magazine articles of recent decades. His argument, which he went on to elaborate in his books Virtually Normal and Same-Sex Marriage and in later essays, is that marriage for gays would "foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence." Sullivan's conservative case would eventually become the intellectual and moral foundation of the campaigns to legalize gay marriage. Sullivan gave Slate permission to reprint his New Republic essay in full.

Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images.

Photograph by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images.

Last month in New York, a court ruled that a gay lover had the right to stay in his deceased partner's rent-control apartment because the lover qualified as a member of the deceased's family. The ruling deftly annoyed almost everybody. Conservatives saw judicial activism in favor of gay rent control: three reasons to be appalled. Chastened liberals (such as the New York Times editorial page), while endorsing the recognition of gay relationships, also worried about the abuse of already stretched entitlements that the ruling threatened. What neither side quite contemplated is that they both might be right, and that the way to tackle the issue of unconventional relationships in conventional society is to try something both more radical and more conservative than putting courts in the business of deciding what is and is not a family. That alternative is the legalization of civil gay marriage.

The New York rent-control case did not go anywhere near that far, which is the problem. The rent-control regulations merely stipulated that a "family" member had the right to remain in the apartment. The judge ruled that to all intents and purposes a gay lover is part of his lover's family, inasmuch as a "family" merely means an interwoven social life, emotional commitment, and some level of financial interdependence.

It's principle now well established around the country. Several cities have "domestic partnership" laws, which allow relationships that do not fit into the category of heterosexual marriage to be registered with the city and qualify for benefits that up till now have been reserved for straight married couples. San Francisco, Berkeley, Madison, and Los Angeles all have legislation, as does the politically correct Washington, D.C., suburb, Takoma Park. In these cities, a variety of interpersonal arrangements qualify for health insurance, bereavement leave, insurance, annuity and pension rights, housing rights (such as rent-control apartments), adoption and inheritance rights. Eventually, accordng to gay lobby groups, the aim is to include federal income tax and veterans' benefits as well. A recent case even involved the right to use a family member's accumulated frequent-flier points. Gays are not the only beneficiaries; heterosexual "live-togethers" also qualify.

There's an argument, of course, that the current legal advantages extended to married people unfairly discriminate against people who've shaped their lives in less conventional arrangements. But it doesn't take a genius to see that enshrining in the law a vague principle like "domestic partnership" is an invitation to qualify at little personal cost for a vast array of entitlements otherwise kept crudely under control.

To be sure, potential DPs have to prove financial interdependence, shared living arrangements, and a commitment to mutual caring. But they don't need to have a sexual relationship or even closely mirror old-style marriage. In principle, an elderly woman and her live-in nurse could qualify. A couple of uneuphemistically confirmed bachelors could be DPs. So could two close college students, a pair of seminarians, or a couple of frat buddies. Left as it is, the concept of domestic partnership could open a Pandora's box of litigation and subjective judicial decision-making about who qualifies. You either are or are not married; it's not a complex question. Whether you are in a "domestic partnership" is not so clear.

More important, the concept of domestic partnership chips away at the prestige of traditional relationships and undermines the priority we give them. This priority is not necessarily a product of heterosexism. Consider heterosexual couples. Society has good reason to extend legal advantages to heterosexuals who choose the formal sanction of marriage over simply living together. They make a deeper commitment to one another and to society; in exchange, society extends certain benefits to them. Marriage provides an anchor, if an arbitrary and weak one, in the chaos of sex and relationships to which we are all prone. It provides a mechanism for emotional stability, economic security, and the healthy rearing of the next generation. We rig the law in its favor not because we disparage all forms of relationship other than the nuclear family, but because we recognize that not to promote marriage would be to ask too much of human virtue. In the context of the weakened family's effect upon the poor, it might also invite social disintegration. One of the worst products of the New Right's "family values" campaign is that its extremism and hatred of diversity has disguised this more measured and more convincing case for the importance of the marital bond.

The concept of domestic partnership ignores these concerns, indeed directly attacks them. This is a pity, since one of its most important objectives-providing some civil recognition for gay relationships-is a noble cause and one completely compatible with the defense of the family. But the way to go about it is not to undermine straight marriage; it is to legalize old-style marriage for gays.

The gay movement has ducked this issue primarily out of fear of division. Much of the gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider, anti-bourgeois, radical. Marriage, for them, is co-optation into straight society. For the Stonewall generation, it is hard to see how this vision of conflict will ever fundamentally change. But for many other gays-my guess, a majority-while they don't deny the importance of rebellion 20 years ago and are grateful for what was done, there's now the sense of a new opportunity. A need to rebel has quietly ceded to a desire to belong. To be gay and to be bourgeois no longer seems such an absurd proposition. Certainly since AIDS, to be gay and to be responsible has become a necessity.

Gay marriage squares several circles at the heart of the domestic partnership debate. Unlike domestic partnership, it allows for recognition of gay relationships, while casting no aspersions on traditional marriage. It merely asks that gays be allowed to join in. Unlike domestic partnership, it doesn't open up avenues for heterosexuals to get benefits without the responsibilities of marriage, or a nightmare of definitional litigation. And unlike domestic partnership, it harnesses to an already established social convention the yearnings for stability and acceptance among a fast-maturing gay community.

Gay marriage also places more responsibilities upon gays; it says for the first time that gay relationships are not better or worse than straight relationships, and that the same is expected of them. And it's clear and dignified. There's a legal benefit to a clear, common symbol of commitment. There's also a personal benefit. One of the ironies of domestic partnership is that it's not only more complicated than marriage, it's more demanding, requiring an elaborate statement of intent to qualify. It amounts to a substantial invasion of privacy. Why, after all, should gays be required to prove commitment before they get married in a way we would never dream of asking of straights?

Legalizing gay marriage would offer homosexuals the same deal society now offers heterosexuals: general social approval and specific legal advantages in exchange for a deeper and harder-to-extract-yourself-from commitment to another human being. Like straight marriage, it would foster social cohesion, emotional security, and economic prudence. Since there's no reason gays should not be allowed to adopt or be foster parents, it could also help nurture children. And its introduction would not be some sort of radical break with social custom. As it has become more acceptable for gay people to acknowledge their loves publicly, more and more have committed themselves to one another for life in full view of their families and their friends. A law institutionalizing gay marriage would merely reinforce a healthy social trend. It would also, in the wake of AIDS, qualify as a genuine public health measure. Those conservatives who deplore promiscuity among some homosexuals should be among the first to support it. Burke could have written a powerful case for it.

The argument that gay marriage would subtly undermine the unique legitimacy of straight marriage is based upon a fallacy. For heterosexuals, straight marriage would remain the most significant--and only legal social bond. Gay marriage could only delegitimize straight marriage if it were a real alternative to it, and this is clearly not true. To put it bluntly, there's precious little evidence that straights could be persuaded by any law to have sex with-let alone marry-someone of their own sex. The only possible effect of this sort would be to persuade gay men and women who force themselves into heterosexual marriage (often at appalling cost to themselves and their families) to find a focus for their family instincts in a more personally positive environment. But this is clearly a plus, not a minus: gay marriage could both avoid a lot of tortured families and create the possibility for many happier ones. It is not, in short, a denial of family values. It's an extension of them.

Of course, some would claim that any legal recognition of homosexuality is a de facto attack upon heterosexuality. But even the most hardened conservatives recognize that gays are a permanent minority and aren't likely to go away. Since persecution is not an option in a civilized society, why not coax gays into traditional values rather than rail incoherently against them?

There's a less elaborate argument for gay marriage: it's good for gays. It provides role models for young gay people who, after the exhilaration of coming out, can easily lapse into short-term relationships and insecurity with no tangible goal in sight. My own guess is that most gays would embrace such a goal with as much (if not more) commitment as straights. Even in our society as it is, many lesbian relationships are virtual textbook cases of monogamous commitment. Legal gay marriage could also help bridge the gulf often found between gays and their parents. It could bring the essence of gay life-a gay couple-into the heart of the traditional straight family in a way the family can most understand and the gay offspring can most easily acknowledge. It could do as much to heal the gay-straight rift as any amount of gay rights legislation.

If these arguments sound socially conservative, that's no accident. It's one of the richest ironies of our society's blind spot toward gays that essentially conservative social goals should have the appearance of being so radical. But gay marriage is not a radical step. It avoids the mess of domestic partnership; it is humane; it is conservative in the best sense of the word. It's also about relationships. Given that gay relationships will always exist, what possible social goal is advanced by framing the law to encourage those relationships to be unfaithful, undeveloped, and insecure?

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Read This Landmark 1989 Essay Making a Conservative Case for Gay Marriage

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In 1989, most Americans had never even heard of gay marriage, and certainly couldn't conceive that it would one day be legalized by popular vote. That year, Andrew Sullivan wrote a landmark essay for the New Republic, "Here Comes the Groom: A (Conservative) Case for Gay Marriage."