http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/11/15/business/1115-SOAPBOX_index.html
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Women in Wall Street
http://thesop.org/business/2009/11/11/women-on-wall-street-americas-new-street-walkers
Women on Wall Street: America's New Street Walkers
When Abigail Adams realised in the 18th century that she could earn a higher rate of return on themoney she and her husband were investing by putting their funds into US government bonds, she had a hard time convincing him she was right. But when their profits soared because of Abigail`s strategy, John Adams, the future President of the United States, had to admit that her financialacumen outdid his.
`The New York Times` railed against noted spiritualist and suffragette Victoria Woodhull when she and her sister opened the first female-owned brokerage firm on Wall Street in 1870. Their alarmed article on the opening of Woodhull, Claflin & Co., "Wall Street Aroused", predicted a "short, speedy winding up" of the firm. Still, Woodhull and her sister managed to earn over $12 million in today`s terms.
The notable 19th century "tycoon" Hetty Green read the financial pages as a child and said of herself at age 14 that she knew "as much about finance as any man". She managed her own money and turned her inheritance into a fortune by investing conservatively, keeping enough cash handy to ride out a market crisis, and never borrowing funds.
These three women and many of their progeny are now being featured at the Museum of American Finance in a groundbreaking exhibit, `Women of Wall Street,` which showcases notable women in the world of finance. Among them are Isabel Benham, Muriel Siebert, and Ann Kaplan.
Benham, who is 100 years old, wanted to study economics when she attended college in the late 1920s but no courses were offered in that field so she was advised to take typing instead. She held firm, insisting that Bryn Mawr College offer the subject. In 1931, she became one of five women to graduate with a degree in economics. Despite the Great Depression, Benham found work as a bond statistician and later went on to become one of the most distinguished railroad analysts on Wall Street. She was also the first woman to be named partner in a Wall Street bond house. "I. Hamilton Benham," as she signed correspondence early in her career to prevent gender discrimination, is now one of the most respected experts on the economics of railroading.
In 1967, Muriel Siebert, known as "the first woman of finance," was the first female to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange - there were over 1,300 men at the time. In 1975, Siebert & Co. became the nation`s first discount brokerage and two years later, Siebert became the first female Superintendent of Banks for New York State, overseeing all of New York`s banks, representing combined assets of $500 billion. It is notable that no banks failed during her tenure. Today, Muriel Seibert continues to serve as president of Siebert & Co. while supporting projects that advocate on behalf of women and minorities in the financial industry as well as those that teach financial literacy.
Ann Kaplan, formerly a general partner and managing director of Goldman Sachs & Co., is the chair of Circle Financial Group, an investment and wealth management membership organisation. Kaplan has made a unique contribution to the world of high finance; as a trained social worker she has focused on cultural shifts in the financial sector and on achieving work-life balance, a topic neither discussed nor accepted before women entered the hallowed halls of Wall Street. She advises women who want to have Wall Street careers to understand the environment they are working in, to take risks, and to think through their career strategy. And, she says, "Take on assignments without asking the question, do I know enough?"
The idea for the Wall Street Women exhibit came from Leena Akhtar, director of exhibits and archives at the museum, following the signing of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act earlier this year. Akhtar wanted to tell the story of these extraordinary women, while inspiring young professional women who might want to enter the field of finance.
"The story of women on Wall Street is the story of women in America," Akhtar wrote in the museum`s magazine, `Financial History`. "Issues of self-determination, freedom and financial independence clashed with societal norms in the all-male domain of finance. Until recent decades, women had been excluded from Wall Street - with some notable, pioneering exceptions. The Museum`s exhibit explores the progress that has been made... through when women began to work with men on Wall Street, to today, when women have more opportunities than ever and are able to balance their careers with their family lives."
"I don`t think (the environment on Wall Street) was particularly set out to be discriminatory," says Nancy Peretsman, Managing Director of Allen & Co. LLC, in a video interview included in the exhibit. "It was just a band of people who were comfortable and familiar with each other... They would give opportunities to people who they felt comfortable with, and the people they felt comfortable with were other white men."
Abby Joseph Cohen, Senior Investment Strategist and President of Global Markets Institute, Goldman Sachs & Co. adds that "women and people of diverse backgrounds has had an enormously beneficial impact on not just the office culture, but on the quality of the work that`s getting done." Rosemary McFadden, Former President of the New York Mercantile Exchange and Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Jersey City, NJ, agrees. "With the sheer numbers of women entering the workforce," she says, "organisations have had to change... and it`s made for a much more healthy and much more productive society. It`s given women the opportunity to earn a career and to be independent... and I think it`s also been liberating towards men. It`s taken some of the burden off them in terms of being the sole breadwinners within a family."
For more information about the exhibit which runs till January 26, 2010, or to learn more about the museum - located in the heart of the financial district in the former headquarters of New York`s first bank - visit www.moaf.org
Women Work?
ABSTRACT: Talk story about attending two meetings of local lady politicians. First went to the Women's National Republican Club to attend a Joint Meeting of the School of Politics and the 1956 Election Campaign Committee, with a sandwich lunch, and later in the afternoon, the Spring Workshop of the Democratic Women's Workshop, with a sandwich supper, at the George Washington Hotel. Sen. Goldwater of Arizona, was scheduled to speak at the first of these affairs but he couldn't come; his administrative assistant, a Mr. Farrington spoke. Mrs. Edward Ewem Anderson, pres. of the club, read a letter from Pres. Eisenhower. At the Democratic affair, a film entitled "You Can Win Elections" was shown; the star of it was Melvyn Douglas. After a sandwich supper, there was a skit called "What Kind of Deal is This?", written by Mrs. David Lilienthal & acted by the Workshop Players. The skit was to be followed by a panel discussion on such topics as discrimination, the farm problem, and the present sorry state of affairs in Washington. Writer left before it took place.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1956/03/31/1956_03_31_026_TNY_CARDS_000254307#ixzz0X6DnkqQv
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1956/03/31/1956_03_31_026_TNY_CARDS_000254307#ixzz0X6DnkqQv
Women Earn Less Than Men, Especially at the Top
Women Earn Less Than Men, Especially at the Top
By CATHERINE RAMPELLIn most jobs, the gap between men’s and women’s earnings narrows greatly when you adjust for factors like career path and experience. But at the top of the income scale — jobs paying more than $100,000 — the salary gap between equally qualified men and women is still vast.
That’s the takeaway from a vast trove of data being released by PayScale, a company that tracks self-reported salary data.
Millions of Web-surfers share their compensation data with PayScale.com, usually with the goal of finding out if their pay is comparable to that of other workers with similar experience and credentials. (In other words, PayScale has a big, but not randomized, sample; more caveats about their numbers are discussed here, in our write-up of their data on salaries by college.)
The company decided to analyze its data to see if it could help explain observed differences in what men and women earn, a subject that has long intrigued economists and women’s rights advocates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earned a median weekly salary in 2008 that was about 80 percent of the pay for men.
PayScale chose 90 common careers that its researchers thought gave a useful cross-section of the labor market: 30 jobs that were primarily held by women (e.g., dental hygienists, of whom 95 percent are women in PayScale’s database); 30 jobs that were primarily held by men (e.g., electrical engineers, of whom 90 percent are men); and 30 that had roughly equal representation between men and women (e.g., pharmacists, of whom 49 percent are women and 51 percent are men). For each particular job, they had anywhere from several thousand to tens of thousands of data points.
The company then examined the data two ways.
First, it looked at the median pay of men compared with women within a given field, both when they started their jobs and at mid-career, using the raw data that workers had provided. By these calculations, they found that within almost every one of their 90 chosen careers, and across careers at every level of education, men earned higher pay than women.
Below is a look at the median pay of men compared with women in each of the 90 jobs examined, with each dot representing a different job. The diagonal line represents where the dots would lie if men and women earned exactly equal pay. Notice how many of the dots fall below that line, indicating that women earn less than men.
Source: PayScale
Then PayScale’s researchers decided to look at how non-gender-related factors affected salaries.
They adjusted the salaries based on hundreds of different factors they had data on, including location of the job, industry, size of the company and the budget a person managed, as well as his or her education and certifications, special skills and length of experience in a field. In some cases, they adjusted the salaries based on industry-specific data (e.g., how many beds are in the hospital a nurse works in).
The goal was to start with the typical characteristics of a male worker in a job, then adjust the characteristics of the typical woman in the job to match those of the average man to see if these two prototypical employees would earn identical salaries.
And for most jobs, they almost did.
Here are the median salaries for men and women in each of the 90 careers chosen by PayScale, after controlling for outside factors than can affect pay other than gender. Notice that for lower-paying jobs, the dots are much closer to that diagonal line representing equal pay.
Source: PayScale
In other words, for most careers the company studied, PayScale found that the pay gay gap is largely the result of outside factors. Within a specific job, before controlling for outside factors the typical female worker earns pay that is only 90 percent of the typical male worker’s pay; after controlling for these variables, she earns 94 percent of the typical male worker’s pay. For jobs paying below $100,000, the gap narrows further.
The implication is that in most jobs where a wage gap exists, it is probably not due to overt discrimination, with bosses deciding, Mad-Men-style, that women should receive unequal pay for equal work. Rather, in most jobs, the different career choices that men and women make — or perhaps the different career opportunities men and women have available to them — account for big differences in pay, says Al Lee, PayScale’s director of quantitative analysis.
But even though the gap narrows when you control for these factors, it is still large when you look at a subset of the careers PayScale examined: the high earners. In jobs that pay more than $100,000, women earn just 87 percent of what men receive, even after adjusting for outside factors. You can see this in the second chart above — around the $100,000 mark, many more dots start to fall beneath the equal-wage line.
So what is so magical about crossing the $100,000 salary mark that allows men to earn so much more than equally qualified women?
Surely everyone will have a pet theory. Mr. Lee, for his part, suggested that higher-paid jobs often have less concrete or quantifiable measures of productivity and duties.
After controlling for outside factors, some of the biggest gender pay gaps are in jobs like chief executive (in which, after PayScale adjusted the data, women earn 71 percent of what men earn), hospital administrator (women earn 77 percent of what equally qualified men earn) and chief operating officer (women earn 80 percent of what equally qualified men earn).
In each of these jobs, performance quality is a relatively subjective measure. Compare those jobs to positions like engineers, actuaries or electricians, where the criteria for a job well done might be relatively more concrete or measurable — and where the salaries earned by men and women are roughly equal.
In other words, theorizes Mr. Lee, jobs in which quality is easier to measure are more likely to be compensated based on merit, so equally qualified men and women are likely to receive equal pay. On the other hand, in jobs where quality measures are more subjective, meritocracy may not rule, and men may be better compensated for reasons other than their qualifications. For example, perhaps men are subconsciously viewed as more competent than women, or are more adept at negotiating for raises.
But then again there are tons of exceptions to this rule, where jobs with more nebulous duties are relatively egalitarian and jobs with more concrete descriptions are not.
There are certainly alternative explanations, including factors that PayScale did not control for. For example, Mr. Lee and his team were not able to control for hours worked each week, since they didn’t have that data. That seems like a pretty significant determinant of income to me.
I’m also curious to know what these trends would look like if PayScale had attempted to conduct the same analysis for every job in their database for which they had a decent sample size; perhaps these 90 jobs are not, after all, representative of the over all job market.
But again, everyone will have a different explanation for the gap in wages. What’s yours?
How would you explain why women at the top of the income scale earn so much less than their male counterparts, even when you control for outside factors?
Saudi Woman Talk about Sex
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60 Lashes Ordered for Saudi Woman
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — A Saudi court sentenced a journalist on Saturday to 60 lashes after she was charged with involvement in a television show in which a Saudi man talked about sex.
The journalist, Rozanna al-Yami, 22, is believed to be the first female Saudi journalist to be given such a punishment. The charges included involvement in preparing the program and advertising it on the Internet. Ms. Yami said she had worked as a coordinator for the program but had not worked on the episode in question. She said the judge, in the western city of Jidda, had handed down the sentence “as a deterrence.”
“I am too frustrated and upset to appeal the sentence,” Ms. Yami said.
Abdul-Rahman al-Hazza, the spokesman of the Ministry of Culture and Information, said he had no details of the sentencing and could not comment on it.
In the program, broadcast in July on the Lebanese satellite channel LBC, the Saudi man, Mazen Abdul-Jawad, described his active sex life and showed sex toys, which the station blurred. The same court sentenced Mr. Abdul-Jawad to five years in prison and 1,000 lashes.
The program scandalized this conservative country, and the government shut down LBC’s two offices in the kingdom.
The Nuns Story
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The Nuns’ Story
WASHINGTON
Once, in the first grade, I was late for class. I started crying in the schoolyard, terrified to go in and face the formidable Sister Hiltruda.
Father Montgomery, who looked like a handsome young priest out of a 1930s movie, found me cowering and took my hand, leading me into the classroom.
Sister Hiltruda looked ready to pop, but she couldn’t say a word to me, then or ever. There was no more unassailable patriarchy than the Catholic Church.
Nuns were second-class citizens then and — 40 years after feminism utterly changed America — they still are. The matter of women as priests is closed, a forbidden topic.
In 2004, the cardinal who would become Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners, resisting any adversarial roles with men and cultivating “feminine values” like “listening, welcoming, humility, faithfulness, praise and waiting.”
Nuns need to be even more sepia-toned for the über-conservative pope, who was christened “God’s Rottweiler” for his enforcement of orthodoxy. Once a conscripted member of the Hitler Youth, Benedict pardoned a schismatic bishop who claimed that there was no Nazi gas chamber. He also argued on a trip to Africa that distributing condoms could make the AIDS crisis worse.
The Vatican is now conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, a dwindling group with an average age of about 70, hoping to herd them back into their old-fashioned habits and convents and curb any speck of modernity or independence.
Nuns who took Vatican II as a mandate for reimagining their mission “started to look uppity to an awful lot of bishops and priests and, of course, the Vatican,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”
The church enabled rampant pedophilia, but nuns who live in apartments and do social work with ailing gays? Sacrilegious! The pope can wear Serengeti sunglasses and expensive red loafers, but shorter hems for nuns? Disgraceful!
“It’s a tragedy because nuns are the jewels of the system,” said Bob Bennett, the Washington lawyer who led the church’s lay inquiry into the pedophilia scandal. “I was of the view that if they had been listened to more, some of this stuff wouldn’t have happened.”
As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer.
“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”
The nuns are pushing back a bit, but it’s hard, since the church has decreed that women can’t be adversarial to men. A nun writing in Commonweal as “Sister X” protests, “American women religious are being bullied.”
She recalls that Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, who heads one of the investigations, moved a meeting at the University of Notre Dame off campus to protest a performance of “The Vagina Monologues.” “It is the rare bishop,” Sister X writes, “who has any real understanding of the lives women actually lead.”
The church can be flexible, except with women. Laurie Goodstein, the Times’s religion writer, reported this month on an Illinois woman who had a son with a Franciscan priest. The church agreed to child support but was stingy with money for college and for doctors, once the son got terminal cancer. The priest had never been disciplined and was a pastor in Wisconsin — until he hit the front page. Even then, “Father” Willenborg was suspended only because the woman said that he had pressed her to have an abortion and that he had also had a sexual relationship with a teenager. (Maybe the church shouldn’t be so obdurate on condoms.)
When then-Cardinal Ratzinger was “The Enforcer” in Rome, he investigated and disciplined two American nuns. One, Jeannine Gramick, then of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, founded a ministry to reconcile gays with the church, which regards homosexual desires as “disordered.” The other, Mary Agnes Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy, headed the Michigan Department of Social Services, which, among other things, paid for abortions for poor women.
Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic congresswoman from Toledo and one of Bishop Blair’s flock, got a resolution passed commending nuns for their humble service and sacrifice. “The Vatican’s in another country,” she said. “Maybe people do things differently there. Perhaps the Holy Spirit will intervene.”
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The Sex of Athletes: One Issue, Many Variables
Track and field’s world governing body has begun trying to devise new rules about who can compete as a woman. This comes nearly two months after being presented with the case of Caster Semenya, the South African runner whose sex was questioned when she won the 800-meter world championship.
Let’s start with the reasonable assumption that we want to maintain gender segregation in most sports. It provides girls and women — half the planet’s population — a real hope of winning. Without that hope, many may not bother.
The pickle, then, is how to maintain that segregation in the face of apparent challenges. A Renée Richards or a Caster Semenya doesn’t come along too often, but often enough that there needs to be explicit rules about who is considered a woman. But what rules?
The current policies of the International Association of Athletics Federations are vague, incomplete and contradictory. For example, one states that some women with some male-typical aspects (including, in some cases, a Y chromosome and testes) can play as women, but it doesn’t specify which combinations disqualify an athlete. This means a woman like Semenya can’t really know for sure, in advance of competition, if she should show up.
The I.A.A.F. requires that transsexual women have their hormone levels kept female-typical through removal of the testes and ingestion of female-typical hormones.
Fair enough. But it allows born-females with adrenal tumors to compete as women, even though their bodies may have higher levels of testosterone than the average male. Not too consistent.
Simply stating which conditions disqualify an athlete would be a step in the right direction, especially if the list is based on standardized principles. But even that may not seem fair for some conditions, because two women with the same diagnosis may have different anatomies and physiologies.
So what is the I.A.A.F. to do? I put that question to three physician-scientists of the sort the I.A.A.F. should be consulting.
Eric Vilain, a professor of human genetics and pediatrics at U.C.L.A., specializes in sex development, so he knows that looking at genes will not tell you simply how a body is functioning. And what we care about is function. “The best biological marker, if you want a level playing field, would probably be functional testosterone,” Vilain said. “There is a good correlation between functional testosterone and muscle mass.”
Measuring functional testosterone would mean not only measuring how much a body is making, but also the level of effect. Some people’s cells react more to testosterone than others’. The challenge of this, Vilain was quick to point out, is not only that high-quality testing is invasive, but that sports officials would have to decide where to make the cutoff.
This could have interesting — and unintended — implications for other athletes. Vilain says he wonders if men with functional testosterone levels below the cutoff would be allowed to compete as women, even though they are men. Would women under the cutoff not be allowed to bring themselves up to the line, to level the hormonal playing field? (The World Anti-Doping Agency allows men with “low” testosterone to take more if they establish a medical need.)
Philip Gruppuso is a pediatric endocrinologist and associate dean for medical education at Brown. Like Vilain, he says the I.A.A.F. must acknowledge that all it can do is make a reasoned choice among many imperfect options. He offered the possibility of using the ratio of androgens (including testosterone) to estrogens.
Vilain and Gruppuso noted that hormone levels at the time of competition were not all that mattered. An athlete’s biological history matters, too. A transsexual woman may now have female-typical hormones, but her bones and muscles developed under male-typical levels. Vilain’s research has suggested that the biological differences between men and women may depend on more than hormonal differences.
Gruppuso said that the I.A.A.F.’s response to the Semenya case revealed that the sport’s officials understood how complicated this matter was.
“It was so obvious — when they brought together gynecologists, geneticists, endocrinologists, psychologists — that there was no way to meld all the various areas of mammalian biology to come up with a single cohesive answer,” he said. “You can’t come up with a single binary answer to that question.”
Perhaps it would be best, Vilain and Gruppuso suggested, to devise an algorithm, one informed by all the sciences available. Nigel Paneth, a professor of epidemiology at Michigan State, says he imagines the I.A.A.F.’s developing clearer rules involving combinations of genetics, endocrinology, anatomy and psychology. This, he said, “would be more scientifically defensible than using just one criterion.” However, he warned, tests will sometimes be wrong, “and some people would no doubt be misclassified.”
This, then, is just some of what the I.A.A.F. must struggle with as it reworks its sex policies. How can it be consistent, across conditions, with regard to what counts as an unfair advantage? What error rate is it willing to accept for tests? Will the policy for various disorders of sex development match, in philosophy, its policies on transsexualism so transgender women are not cheated or benefited? How will the policies also affect athletes competing as men? Can the I.A.A.F. justify biological restrictions regarding some inborn conditions, given that natural variation has long been accepted as inevitable and fair in sport?
No easy job. And on top of all that, the I.A.A.F. will need to think about how its decisions will affect the tens of thousands of people who will, by implication, be judged male or female by these “verification” policies.
Gruppuso said he wondered what it would mean for his pediatric patients with disorders of sex development and gender-identity questions if sports officials and the public were to continue confusing who you are — boy or girl, man or a woman — with what your cells do.
Women Directors
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Fund Plans to Invest in Companies With Women as Directors
A Swiss investment company plans to raise awareness about the shortage of women on corporate boards around the world and generate returns for its investors in the process.
Naissance Capital, based in Zurich, will start the Women’s Leadership Fund in January, which will invest in companies whose boards include women. It also plans to take minority stakes in companies without women on their boards and to use its ownership to encourage changes.
R. James Breiding, a co-founder of Naissance Capital and a former director of Rothschild Corporate Finance, said the fund was created after several studies showed a correlation between the number of female directors and a company’s performance.
“We feel companies that select and recruit people on merit should do better,” Mr. Breiding said. “Having greater diversity and independence of opinions helps.”
The fund’s board includes Kim Campbell, the former prime minister of Canada; Cherie Blair, a lawyer and the wife of Tony Blair, the former British prime minister; and Jenny Shipley, the former prime minister of New Zealand.
Naissance has lined up $200 million from institutional investors and individuals to invest in 30 to 40 companies around the world, and plans to increase the size of the fund eventually to about $2 billion. The minimum investment for the fund is $100,000. Naissance, which was founded in 1999 and specializes in what it calls “niche investment opportunities,” is one of a handful of firms that have created funds over the last three years to invest in companies with female senior executives.
Stargate Capital in Britain is in the process of raising a second venture capital fund, worth about £10 million ($16 million) to help female entrepreneurs. Amazone Euro, a fund run in Geneva, has invested in companies with female board members.
Two separate studies in 2007 by McKinsey and Catalyst, both business research firms, showed that the companies in Europe and the United States with the most women on their boards were more profitable than others. The studies did not point to specific causes for any such correlation.
The banking crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers have ignited a debate about whether more women in senior roles would help improve corporate governance.
In Britain, the minister for women and equality, Harriet Harman, drew attention after she partly blamed the lack of women in senior roles in the financial industry for the crisis, saying if it had been “Lehman Sisters” rather than Lehman Brothers, the company might have survived.
A review sponsored by the British government on an overhaul of corporate governance, to be published next month, could add to pressures on companies to promote equality of the sexes among their directors.
Europe lags behind the United States in gender equality in boardrooms, according to the consulting firm 20-First. About 68 percent of companies in Europe have no women on their executive committees, compared with 11 percent in the United States. In Asia, the figure is 82 percent.
On One Field, Two Goals: Equality and Statehood
NYTIMES-http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/world/middleeast/29westbank.html
AL RAM, West Bank — Given the sheer exhilaration of the cheering, flag-waving, anthem-singing crowd packed into the soccer stadium in this otherwise drab West Bank town one afternoon this week, one could have been forgiven for thinking that an independentPalestinian state had just been born
The Palestinians were playing the Jordanians. But more significant was that the women’s teams were playing, and for the Palestinian side it was the first international match played outdoors at home.
In front of a roaring crowd of at least 10,000 — about three-quarters women and a quarter equally enthusiastic men — the Palestinian players imparted a collective sense of achievement that had eluded their male compatriots for a long time.
With the peace process stalled and the Palestinian polity divided, the atmosphere is generally dour. Yet the game turned into an exuberant carnival of social liberation and national pride. The line between the dual quests for equality and statehood became increasingly blurred as the women chased the ball.
“In our culture,” said Rukayya Takrori, 50, the Palestinian team’s manager, “Palestinian women work side by side with the men in the fields and factories. They fight together, demonstrate together. Sometimes she takes the place of the man because he is in jail or is in the mountains, hiding.”
This game, she said, proved that “Palestinian women can do everything — even football.”
In Al Ram, just north of Jerusalem, signs of the Israeli occupation are never far away. The stadium sits half a block from Israel’s West Bank separation barrier. Though it is made up mostly of a fence, barbed wire and ditches, here in this urban environment it takes the form of a high, seemingly endless concrete wall.
To enter Jerusalem, West Bank residents must have special permits and pass through the nearby Kalandia checkpoint, a gray, prisonlike crossing of turnstiles and watchtowers. On Sunday, an Israeli security guard on duty there was stabbed and wounded by a young Palestinian woman.
But at Monday’s soccer game, Palestinians came together in a more peaceful endeavor for the cause. Though nonpartisan, the event clearly bore the stamp of the non-Islamist camp that holds sway in the West Bank.
Watching over the players on the field were huge posters of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas. A couple of images of King Abdullah II of Jordan had been hastily added. Several dignitaries attended, including the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad.
FIFA, the international governing body of football, as soccer is known in most of the world, also sent a representative, in a salute to the Palestinian commitment to the sport.
Most of the women played bareheaded, though one Palestinian and a few of the Jordanians wore hijabs and tights under their shorts. The Palestinian team’s captain, Honey Thaljieh, 24, is a Christian from Bethlehem. The youngest player, Aya Khatib, 14, is a Muslim from a refugee camp near Jericho.
For such a varied cross section of Palestinian society, an unusual harmony prevailed.
“There are no politics involved,” said Nur Nabulsi, 17, a member of the Palestinian team. “We play only for Palestine.”
The women have found an unlikely champion in Jibril Rajoub, the president of the Palestinian Football Association and a former chief of the once-feared Preventive Security apparatus in the West Bank.
In an interview in Ramallah days before the game, he said he had made a point throughout his career of promoting women. As a security chief, he said, he opened all the departments to female recruits. “I erased forever the idea of ladies being only secretaries,” he declared.
Soon after taking over the football association in May 2008, he created a women’s league. The result of Monday’s game was not important, he said, adding, “For me, it is a historic event.”
Mr. Rajoub wants the American soccer officials to send a team to play in the West Bank. He says it would be more effective in winning Palestinian hearts and minds than the repeated visits of George J. Mitchell, the Obama administration’s special envoy to the Middle East.
Sport, says Mr. Rajoub, is the “right way to show we are looking for peace and independence — we are peaceful ambassadors for our cause.”
Asked about playing the Israelis, Mr. Rajoub said it was “premature to talk that way.” The players on the field, he noted, could meet in very different circumstances at a checkpoint the next day.
As the game got under way, thousands more Palestinian men filled the rooftops overlooking the stadium and pressed against the fence. The first half ended ominously: 1-0 for Jordan, after the Palestinian side accidentally scored in its own goal.
The play was feisty on both sides. Two Jordanians were carried off on stretchers, and the Palestinians were granted two penalty kicks because of Jordanian fouls. It ended in a 2-2 tie.
The result was a bonus for the Palestinians, who had modest expectations. “It is good for us,” Ms. Takrori, the team manager, said after the game. “We did not believe we would score.”
Women Ascend to Iraq’s Elite Police Officer Corps
NYTIMES-http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/world/middleeast/10iraq.html
BAGHDAD — As one, the stony faces broke into a free-for-all of kisses, hugs and tears on Monday as the 50 women who called themselves the Lioness group became the first female graduates ofIraq’s police officer training academy.
On a vast concrete parade ground, the women joined 1,050 male classmates in what American military officers, who provided advice on the training, called a step forward for the country and its women.
“Some people have a view of Iraqi women that for them to join the police academy is a shame,” said Alla Nozad Falih, 22, wearing a star on her epaulet that marked her as a first lieutenant. Like about half of the group’s members, she wore her hair uncovered except by a uniform blue beret, and like 26 of her female classmates, she joined the academy after finishing law school.
The job of officer in the national police force is among the highest paying available in Iraq, but also one of the most dangerous; officers and trainees are favorite targets of insurgents.
“It’s been my desire since I was a kid to be a police officer, and now I am one,” Lieutenant Falih said. “We are proud to be officers, and we encourage other women to be officers because it’s a great job.”
Women have long worked in the lower police ranks here, directing traffic or searching other women at checkpoints, but until now they have been ineligible for the elite officers’ corps. The government changed the rules this year. Several police officials who were questioned did not have an explanation for either the change or the previous prohibition.
The women studied and trained separately from the men, but were subject to the same standards, said Col. Randy Twitchell of the United States Army, a consultant on the nine-month course.
Though the graduates do not have their first assignments yet, Colonel Twitchell and others said the women would not be shunted into administrative jobs, but would take part in investigations and forensic work.
For First Lt. Noor Waled, 22, who joined the academy after getting a degree in anthropology, the hardest part was the physical drill. “Everyone knows women have soft bodies, so it’s difficult for us to do military training like jumping or climbing,” she said.
Other graduates said the hardest part was learning to handle firearms, a skill in which their male classmates had much more experience.
“When we first joined, we were shy about wearing the uniforms, carrying guns and everything,” said First Lt. Farah Hameed, 24, who was a legal investigator before joining the academy. “But right now we are ready to do anything. Even the trainer said, ‘Now I can tell you are real officers by the way you walk.’ ”
All said their families had encouraged them to join the academy. But during the course some mentioned receiving threats from men in their communities, said Nana Shriver, a Danish police major who was an adviser on the women’s training.
Though the male students all slept at the academy, there was no housing for women, so they had to commute, some leaving their homes as early as 4 a.m. and returning after dark.
“We had workshops about the challenges they face from males, from society,” Major Shriver said. “Some said they were threatened by others because they were female.”
But Lieutenant Hameed, like others, said their gender provided advantages. They could interview women and children in crimes like rape or sexual abuse in a way that would be hard for men, she said.
“Everyone says men are able to do everything, but that’s not true,” she said. “In investigations, especially with women, women use their compassion with victims to get them to answer questions clearly.”
Next year’s class will have 100 women, Colonel Twitchell said.
As Iraq moved on Monday to prepare for parliamentary elections, the Independent High Electoral Commission suggested rescheduling them to Jan. 21, from Jan. 16, because of delays in the passage of an election law, which was approved Sunday. The constitutional deadline for the elections is Jan. 31.
The United States military on Monday announced three deaths: two American pilots were killed in a helicopter crash west of Tikrit in northern Iraq on Sunday, and a Marine died Sunday of injuries not related to combat in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad. The deaths raised the total of Americans killed in Iraq to 141 so far this year, compared with 314 in all of 2008 and 904 in 2007, according to the Web site icasualties.org.
In the northern area of Mosul, two police officers were killed and one was wounded by an improvised bomb placed near a police patrol, and two civilians were killed and one wounded in a shootout with police officers, according to a police official.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Iraqi women’s wrestling team irks clerics–tribesman calls for their slaughter
http://vladtepesblog.com/?p=11088
Iraqi women wrestler spark controversy
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/05/iraq-women-wrestlers-spar_n_252093.html
RSPB retains title of National Women's Boxing Championshi
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/boxing/RSPB-retains-title-of-National-Womens-Boxing-Championship/articleshow/5100286.cms
India revokes suspension of woman world champion
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/boxing/2009-10-07-3191229131_x.htm
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