Anne Litwin

Once in a while, events in the country bring different interest groups into alignment to work together for structural change. It seems possible that the combination of the urgency of hardships families are experiencing wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and the narrow Senate majority established by the election of two Georgia democrats will create that possibility. As I wrote in a previous post, citing Claire Cain Miller, “Nearly everybody cares for family at some point”:

• In two-thirds of married couples with children, both parents work.
• Nearly half of adults in their forties and fifties are caring for both children and parents.
• The United States is the only developed Western country that does not support working parents with national policies for paid family leave or subsidized childcare.

New legislation proposed by the Biden-Harris team “approaches the care economy in a holistic way, across the age spectrum,” says Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, in an article by Paula Span. Their plan combines Medicaid benefits for older and disabled adults, preschool funding for toddlers, and better pay and benefits for home-care and childcare workers into one package. Specifically, Span explains:

• The Biden-Harris plan builds on earlier campaigns for paid family leave and recent efforts to rebalance Medicaid, making it more focused on covering caregiving at home for older adults rather than in dreaded nursing homes.
• Their plan would convert “the anemic federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandates only unpaid leave, into 12 weeks of paid leave.”
• It proposes a tax credit for as much as $5,000 to reimburse families for expenses associated with unpaid caregiving, such as paid help, home modifications, remote safety monitoring devices, and hearing aids.
• It would also give family members social security credits for time out of the labor force to care for family members.

How will this caregiver package be paid for? Span notes that the Biden team asserts that the costs can be paid for over ten years “by rolling back tax breaks for real estate investors with incomes over $400,000 and increasing tax compliance for other high earners.” The Biden team also asserts that the plan will create three million new caregiving and education jobs and increase employment by five million by allowing unpaid caregivers to reenter the work force.

This kind of change is so needed but will not happen without strong support. Let’s let our congressmembers know that we support caregivers by writing and calling them to support this legislation when it comes up—and I believe that it will come up soon.

Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash

Title IX of the Education Amendment, signed into law in 1972, “forbade institutions receiving federal funds—virtually all public schools and universities—from discriminating on the basis of gender” in organized sports, as reported by Margaret Renkl in the New York Times. Practically speaking, this meant that schools had to provide equivalent resources for sports, but they did not have to let the women and men play on the same teams. This is why the story of Sarah Fuller is so significant. Fuller was invited to step onto the field for the Vanderbilt University football team, the Commodores, in November 2020. Fully suited up in pads and team jersey, she became the first woman to play in a Power 5 football game when she performed the second-half kickoff. Renkl notes that Fuller wore her own helmet emblazoned with the words “Play Like a Girl,” the slogan of a nonprofit that promotes sports and STEM opportunities for girls.

Thanks to Title IX, Fuller had the training, skills, and confidence to step in when the team, due to the coronavirus, was left without a kicker. The Vanderbilt women’s soccer team had just won the Southeastern Conference Division I championship with Fuller as a goalkeeper with a powerful kick—and the Commodores badly needed a kicker. She received a personal tweet from Hillary Clinton saying, “Thank you, Sarah, for helping to prove that women and girls belong on every playing field—quite literally.” Why shouldn’t women and girls be able to bring their talents to any and every field, not just those designated for women and girls?

In fact, so many opportunities in sports and elsewhere are defined as “for women” or “for men” when, in reality, the lines of sex, gender, and talent are blurred and beyond these binary categories. Talents are denied rather than celebrated based on criteria that are unfair and unproven. Jeré Longman of the New York Times writes about the uproar over who can compete in certain competitions in the Olympics. Based on sex testing that arbitrarily defines which chromosomes and hormones qualify someone to run a race as a woman, Longman cites Payoshni Mitra, an Indian scholar and athlete’s rights activist, as saying that the World Athletics organization is committing human rights violations by enforcing testosterone regulation on intersex athletes like Caster Semenya of South Africa and Annet Negesa of Uganda, both talented athletes who identify as women and who are not being allowed to compete unless they agree to undergo medical intervention. Longman notes that Human Rights Watch has deemed “medically unnecessary and humiliating” medical interventions as discriminatory and racially biased, disproportionately affecting women of color when there is no scientific consensus on the precise impact of testosterone on athletic performance.

Maybe it’s time to remove these artificial barriers of sex and gender and let all people bring their talents to whatever their field of endeavor is.

Photo by John Torcasio on Unsplash

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare some facts about occupational segregation by gender in the United States. As I explained in a previous post,

• Essential workers in the United States, whose jobs were deemed “too vital to be halted” during the pandemic, are overwhelmingly women.
• The jobs of these essential workers are generally underpaid, undervalued, and unseen. Over half of all essential workers in the United States are women who are paid well below fifteen dollars an hour.

The underpaid roles of these essential works—along with other roles that are segregated by gender including, healthcare workers, childcare workers, home healthcare aides, teachers, social workers, and administrative office workers—are considered to be “women’s work” by society and, as such, less valued. These underpaid roles contribute to the gender wage gap, “a feature of every economy on earth,” as reported by Anna Louie Sussman of the New York Times. Sussman notes that clearly our efforts at achieving “pay equity” have not worked so far, and she suggests that the problem is our approach. Instead of working toward pay equity, Sussman maintains that we should be focusing on achieving “equal pay for work of equal value” to break through the wall of low pay for “women’s work.” The value of a job should be determined by skills, level of responsibility, work conditions, and degree of physical effort and be compared to the pay men get for jobs that require these same skill levels and efforts. Sussman asks, “whether a female-dominated occupation such as nursing home aide, for instance, is really so different from a male-dominated one, such as corrections officer, when both are physically exhausting, emotionally demanding, and stressful—and if not, why is the nursing home aide paid so much less?”

Sussman points to efforts in New Zealand implemented by law in November 2020, which she explains are “aimed at eliminating pay discrimination against women in female-dominated occupations.” She suggests that this new law could provide a road map to the rest of the world about how to eliminate the “seemingly intractable gender pay gap. . . . What is really at stake,” Sussman explains, “is . . . a societywide reckoning with the value of ‘women’s work.’”

Sussman notes that the idea of focusing on pay equity, or equal pay for work of equal value, is not new:

• In 1919, the International Labor Organization proposed pay equity for women. It was ratified in 1953 by 173 countries (but the United States) but was never implemented.
• In the 1970s and 1980s, thanks to feminist activists and scholars, the idea gained momentum in the United States but was snuffed out by the courts in 1985 in a case pushing for “comparable worth” wage standards. The courts deemed this approach to wage equity to be an interference with the free markets for labor. The Reagan administration elevated the free-market argument and stifled further efforts to gain traction with this approach.

In 2012 in New Zealand, a breakthrough occurred when Kristine Bartlett, a caregiver who worked for more than twenty years in a home for the elderly, making barely above minimum wage, filed a claim with the Employment Relations Authority against her employer. The claimant asked the court to look closely at why caring for the elderly was any less demanding and dangerous than better-paid occupations mostly performed by men, such as prison guards. The Bartlett claim was settled out of court with resulting pay increases of 15 percent to 49 percent for 55,000 workers. The settlement sparked new claims throughout the public sector from other female-dominated occupations, such as midwives, social workers, and school support staff. Subsequently,

• In 2017, with a newly elected feminist prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, the government of New Zealand went to work on establishing principles and processes for resolving pay equity claims.
• In 2018, a settlement on behalf of state-employed social workers demonstrated that female-dominated occupations could be evaluated in a bias-free way.
• In November 2020, a new law in New Zealand went into effect to require the pay-equity approach to eliminating the gender pay gap.

Sussman points out that it is still not easy to apply a gender-free lens to evaluating all occupations because in the real world,

• Value is assigned through an interplay of employer power, social beliefs and biases like racism and sexism
• Biases must be unlearned, which is not easy

It has been easier to implement the new pay equity evaluations in the public sector occupations because the government is the employer. Sussman notes that supporters of pay equity counter the private sector argument that pay equity is not affordable by pointing out that employers are not entitled to make profits on the backs of underpaid women and businesses that can’t pay fair wages are not viable businesses.

Sussman ends by saying that now we will see “what happens when an entire society, led by a feminist prime minister, decides . . . to say yes” to pay equity. Let’s keep our eyes on this approach. New Zealand has figured out a lot—and perhaps we will have a feminist president someday who will provide the vision and the will to implement pay equity in the United States.

Photo courtesy of Army Medicine (CC BY 2.0)

I got the message early in life that it was better to be a boy than a girl. I heard my parents talk about my father’s disappointment that I, his firstborn child, was a girl when he wanted a boy. I tried to be his son. I played sports with the boys in the neighborhood, and my father was proud. I climbed trees and did rough-and-tumble boy activities, and my mother was horrified. She sent me to take ballet lessons so I would be more graceful like a girl should be. I got the message but rebelled against it. I joined the neighborhood boys in throwing rocks at the boring neighborhood girls. I was called a “tomboy.”

Mary Katharine Tramontana, writing for the New York Times, interviewed Lisa Selin Davis, the author of a new book entitled Tomboy. Davis suggests that gender norms are still rigidly enforced in the United States and children learn and internalize these stereotypes by the age of six. These messages are designed to make sure that kids are straight and conform to gender norms that result in different skill sets. I remember trying to buy Lego and erector sets for the daughters of friends to encourage their development of special skills. The toys in stores were segregated by gender. The construction sets for girls were packaged in pink boxes and consisted of materials to build simple houses and castles—basically dollhouses. The sets for boys were coded blue and contained complex materials to build motorized trucks, robots, and war machines. In other words, Davis notes that gendered toys are designed to develop interpersonal relationship skills for girls and the skills of spatial relationships, problem solving, and independence for boys.

Not much has changed since the word tomboy was coined in 1556 to divide childhood into skills and traits defined as masculine and feminine. Davis tells us that historically, “girls being less ‘girly’ are historically ‘acceptable,’ if not celebrated,” as long as they become feminine by puberty to prepare for being wives and mothers. Davis notes, though, that the opposite is not true for boys. The tomboy’s counterpart for boys is the “sissy,” which “carries the homophobic and misogynistic warning to boys: Don’t be like a girl.”
The acceptable coding for gender has not always been the same. For example, Davis and Tramontana agree that for decades in the United States, pink was a boy’s color and in the nineteenth century, most boys played with dolls.

Tramontana cites Davis’s book as arguing that “American childhood is more gendered now than in recent generations.” Davis explains that in the 1970s, “U.S. feminism permeated consumer culture, and masculine styles were marketed to girls.” The reverse was never marketed to boys, however, to ensure that boys were straight. The antifeminist backlash of the Reagan era created social pressure to return to traditional gendered values.

In her book, Davis discusses ways that parents and educators can resist gendering childhood to ensure the healthy psychological development of children. One suggestion is to allow ambiguity for children’s explorations and expressions. Treat little boys who wear dresses and want nail polish as just boys wearing dresses and not as a problem. The same for girls who don’t want to wear dresses. Davis states, “It’s incredibly important for children to see ‘masculine’ girls and women and ‘feminine’ boys and men, and  to know that qualities we’ve labeled that way are not rooted in sex.”

Governments and corporations can take important steps too. For example, in Britain, advertisements cannot include gendered stereotypes, according to new rules issued by the Advertising Standards Authority. And Target no longer has gender-segregated toy aisles.

Davis states that if we embrace ambiguity, children and parents will experience a lot less distress.

Photo courtesy of Janet McKnight (CC BY 2.0)

An important new study conducted for the Brookings Institute by Tuugi Chuluun and Kevin L. Young provides a novel view of women’s representation in organizations around the globe. The authors, by using a new network analysis technique, note that the lack of representation of women in leadership positions in the United States is well documented: thirty-seven Fortune 500 companies have women CEOs, and only three of these CEOs are women of color.

They note that globally, many initiatives exist that promote more women to leadership and increase diversity in boardrooms and in government. “However,” Chuluun and Young state, “women, and especially women of color, remain dramatically underrepresented, and the coronavirus pandemic threatens progress we have made on this front because of gender inequality in the division of housework.”

This new study seeks to gain a more complete picture of women’s representation beyond counting the numbers of women in leadership and on boards. These authors posit that greater numbers of minority individuals, including women, in leadership may not mean greater influence in organizations and society because minority leaders may be marginalized from elite networks where influence on organizations and society is leveraged. They suggest that power and influence comes from these elite networks, where trust, cooperation, and information is shared. Their analysis identifies the group of organizational leaders within the network who are more connected to one another at the center of the analysis and compares them to the peripheral nodes that are loosely interconnected.

Why do networks matter? The authors explain that “a woman who is on the board of a powerful organization with global reach . . . is not likely to be as powerful as the woman who is on the board of several organizations, all of which are densely connected to yet more powerful people.” These densely connected people are the global elite. The authors examined the dynamics of board ties across organizations to study interrelationships among elites and how an individual’s connections and position in the elite network relate to their gender and race. Their study analyzed 1,600 individuals who serve as board members in nearly one hundred globally prominent organizations, including the largest corporations, think tanks, and NGOs like the World Health Organization and the International Monetary Fund.

Findings

The authors’ report shows that women of all racial groups are marginalized at the periphery of these power networks and are not part of the “inner circles” where greater power and influence reside. They note, “Women—and non-white women in particular—are proportionately more confined to peripheral positions within the network.” In fact,

• Representation of white males increases when moving from the periphery to the core
• For women, their representation declines when moving toward the core

The authors conclude that as this is true for women of all racial groups, it appears that gender is the most significant determinant of who is in the “core” of the elite networks. Even though being white offers significant advantages in professional settings, representation for white women declines precipitously at the core of elite networks.

Why does women’s inclusion or exclusion from elite networks matter? The authors suggest that

• Decisions are impacted by backgrounds and cognitive biases
• Gender is a pervasive social institution that informs the way people process information and make decisions
• The lack of women’s influence in the decision-making of elite circles has global implications for policy, mobilization of resources, and power that affect societies
• Diversity among leadership affects the financial performance of organizations

As long as women remain on the periphery of elite networks, their power and influence on organizations and society remain limited. We need women to finally be integrated into the inner circles of power. Studies like this one shine light into the dark corners of power and open possibilities for change.

Photo courtesy of Michigan Municipal League (CC BY-ND 2.0)

It is always exciting when new barriers are broken by women. Kim Ng and Erika James recently became the first Asian American and woman of color, respectively, appointed in their roles, and Abby Phillip and Savannah Guthrie are being recognized as rising stars. What follows is some information about their accomplishments.

For the first time ever, a woman, Kim Ng, has ascended to the role of full-time general manager of a major league men’s baseball team, the Miami Marlins. Tyler Kepner and James Wagner of the New York Times report that Ng is only the second person of Asian descent, after Farhan Zaidi of the San Francisco Giants, to lead a baseball operations department. Her parents were both United States citizens of Chinese descent.

Kepner and Wagner note that Ng’s inspirations were Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. Ng admires that King fought for equality, and Navratilova “changed the idea of what it looked like to be a female athlete.” Ng intends to continue setting an example for other minorities and women. She notes, “You can’t be it if you can’t see it.”

The next trailblazer is Erika James, the first woman and the first person of color to be appointed dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the school’s 139 year history. As a change in direction, Wharton hired James to integrate diversity and inclusion, inequality, climate change, immigration, and the role of business in society into the curriculum of the business school. David Gelles, writing for the New York Times cites James as saying, “The conversations in the classrooms are changing because the students are asking for it. Their expectation is that . . . we’re going to have coursework and reading material and discussions on corporate social responsibility.” Gelles explains that as the nation’s oldest business school, the Wharton School has an outsize influence on shaping the culture of corporate America. James is leading a much needed change in the shaping of corporate culture.

Abby Phillip is a rising star at CNN. As a reporter for the Washington Post until 2017, she was a national political reporter covering the White House. After leaving the Post, she became a CNN political correspondent covering the 2020 election where her intellect, courage, and interviewing skills came into public view. Katherine Rosman writes that Phillip, like many female reporters of color, “suffered particular public ridicule” by President Trump, who told her during a press conference that she asked “a lot of stupid questions.” Phillip never lost her focus on asking the hard questions that needed to be asked, including when she moderated a debate between Democratic presidential candidates where she challenged Senator Bernie Sanders for saying that Senator Elizabeth Warren could not win the election because she was a woman. “Why did you say that?” she asked. On November 6, while anchoring the election returns with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, both senior correspondents for CNN, Phillip, age thirty-one, announced that the vote tallies coming in from Georgia and Pennsylvania in favor of Joe Biden were because of Black women. “Black women did that,” she announced. Bash reflected that in that moment, she knew a star was being born as Phillip’s intellect and style were on full display.

Savannah Guthrie also gained prominence during the presidential election. Already an established television host of a popular news program, the Today Show, she gained wider recognition by conducting a last-minute interview with President Trump when he cancelled the second presidential debate with Joe Biden. Sridhar Pappu of the New York Times writes that Guthrie did what many thought impossible: she “humbled, even humiliated, a man who had steamrolled his way to power, belittling journalists along the way.” Guthrie relentlessly pursued Trump with well-informed follow-up questions that challenged his lies and demanded to know why he was retweeting conspiracy theories. Most famously she said to him, “You’re the president. You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle who can retweet whatever.” It seems that NBC is taking new notice of her toughness and skill.

Let us wish these female trailblazers luck as they take on new roles and challenges. And let’s support them whenever we can.

Photo courtesy of Anthony Quintano (CC BY 2.0)

Christine Lagarde, who became the first female president of the European Central Bank (ECB) in 2019, is already demonstrating the difference that women leaders can make. In an interview conducted by Alison Smale and Jack Ewing of the New York Times, Lagarde lays out her vision for the European Central Bank, which represents a significant departure from past ECB presidents, who were traditionally focused on managing European economic and monetary policy. Lagarde’s vision is broad:

• Fight climate change
• Encourage global cooperation
• Strengthen the credibility of international institutions

Lagarde also articulates what she thinks women leaders bring to leadership that is value added. The authors note that “one year into her eight-year term at the bank, Ms. Lagarde, 64, hopes to use her experience not only as an international lawyer, former French finance minister and head of the International Monetary Fund but as a woman to accelerate change, with a particular focus on saving the planet.”

Lagarde and Janet Yellen agree that women bring a different focus and different priorities to leadership than do men. In an earlier post, Yellen, the former first female chair of the Federal Reserve and Biden’s nomination for the first female secretary of the Treasury, explains that women bring a sense of fairness about economic inequities that is underrepresented in the field of economics. Smale and Ewing note that Lagarde, specifically in reference to combatting climate change, states that because she is a woman, she brings a sense of urgency and determination. She notes that women bring different powers to the table, such as

• The power of life. Lagarde states, “I think that actually giving birth gives you a sense of prosperity, heritage. . . . I think maternity is central to making sure that our children inherit something that is sustainable” for themselves and future generations to live in.
• The power of the purse. She notes that often women are the decision-makers when it comes to consuming.
• The power of resilience in the face of change. Lagarde notes that numerous studies show the importance of resilience in leading change, which research shows is a leadership strength for women.

Lagarde also notes other strengths she has observed in women leaders:

• Women are more inclusive than mercurial.
• Women are more patient than impatient.
• Women are more respectful than abrasive.

As a case in point, she notes that her working relationships with the other two women in executive leadership in Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany, are particularly good. She notes that the three of them know each other quite well, which facilitates a rapid exchange of communication without protocol. Strong relationships produce easy communication. She also notes that none of the three women really care about who gets credit relative to each other. In other words, less ego and vanity results in easier collaboration. These two points track well with other research showing women leaders to be more relational and collaborative in their leadership styles as strengths.

Smale and Wing also cite Lagarde noting that the pandemic is revealing the importance of multinational cooperation, which requires leaders to be open and honest about what is wrong and willing to work together. It is good that a few more women are now at the international decision-making table. We need them now more than ever—and we need even more of them.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Roosevelt Institute and John Jay College of Criminal Justice published a new study that reveals important information about the wage gap for highly educated African American women in the workforce. Much has been written about the gender wage gap for women in general in the United States. Michelle Holder, the author of this study and assistant professor of economics at John Jay, points out that corporate profits have increased over the last few decades while wages in general in the United States have stagnated. In 2018, domestic corporate profits totaled $2 trillion while full-time workers’ (median) annual salary sat at $46,800. Holder notes that among the factors contributing to stagnant wages over the past few decades are globalization, technology, and decreasing bargaining power of labor unions.

The author reports that the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that women in general experienced a gender wage gap in 2018 of 81.6 percent of men’s wages, while Black women working full time earned sixty-one cents for every dollar that white men earned. These simple numbers mask complex factors that play a role, such as occupational crowding based on sex, gender socialization, employer bias, historical exclusionary practices on the part of unions, and the “motherhood penalty.” Holder notes that African American women experience both a gender wage gap and a racial wage gap, which she names the “double gap.” She explains that the impact of the combination of these two types of discrimination on wages are probably not just additive but multiplicative for African American women. The purpose of this research is to quantify the double gap for highly educated African American women.

“African American women have held a uniquely entrenched yet peculiar place in the American labor force,” explains Holder, “since the first enslaved African woman” was brought to the United States to provide involuntary, unpaid labor within and outside of white households. After emancipation, African American women continued to labor as primarily agricultural or domestic workers.  These occupations were the only ones open to them—occupations excluded from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies establishing Social Security and other benefits for workers.

Holder explains that her research takes an unusual approach and examines occupational wage differentials between African American women and similarly educated white non-Latinx men because non-Latinx men, as a demographic group, possess the best wage-bargaining power with employers. Holder’s research is based on the 2017 American Community Survey (ACS) database with a sample size of over 3 million. This research includes all twenty-two major occupation groups in the 2017 ACS sample and includes only participants who are

• full-time employees of at least thirty-five hours per week
• people employed only in the private, for-profit sector
• non-Latinx persons
• US citizens
• Black women and non-Latinx white men with the same education levels, determined by the fiftieth and ninety-nineth percentile educational attainment levels of African American women in each occupation.

The education levels under investigation were probably a minimum of some college and a maximum of graduate level and postdoctoral education. The attainment levels of the Black women were used to establish the boundaries for comparison with the white men. The same attainment levels were then used to match white non-Latinx male workers in matching occupations.

Here are the research’s findings:

• The aggregate wage differential between highly educated African American women and similarly educated white non-Latinx men in the United States in 2017 was $50.9 billion.
• Specifically, African American women were underpaid in sales occupations by $9.1 billion.
• Another large gap was for health practitioners. The annual wage gap was a differential of $49,683 compared to white non-Latinx men in the same occupations with the same levels of education.
• The largest absolute pay gap, according to related research, is in the physician and surgeon occupational categories.

In conclusion, Holder states, “The findings from this research suggest that African American women’s labor power is largely undercompensated by employers, with tangible implications for income and asset-building in the Black community—as well as significant cost savings, in the tens of billions of dollars annually, for the private, for-profit sector.” We need government policies that hold companies accountable for these inequities. This is shameful.

Photo by August de Richelieu from Pexels

I have always been outraged by stories of sexual and emotional abuse of young women athletes. I remember how vulnerable I was as an adolescent to the power of authority figures such as teachers, bosses, and landlords. The stories of the more than five hundred victims of sexual abuse by the team doctor of the USA Gymnastics organization, Lawrence G. Nassar, revealed in 2017 when eighteen of his victims filed a federal lawsuit raise huge questions about how Nassar was able to continue this abuse for decades without consequences. The answer seems to lie in the culture of Olympic sports that protects abusers of young athletes and encourages a toxic culture of abuse.

Since Nassar’s conviction for sex crimes, other instances of abuse of young Olympic athletes have come to light against coaches who are mentally, physically, and verbally abusive to young female athletes. In a recent article by Juliet Macur in the New York Times, several gymnasts have filed complaints against Mary Wright, a coach who, much to the distress of her victims, was recently named to the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame. One complainant against Wright, Hailee Hoffman, explains that as a former Stanford gymnast she was subject to years of emotional, physical, and verbal abuse by Wright. Four other gymnasts have since come forward with complaints against Wright that include

• Being publicly ridiculed by the coach
• Being called stupid, lazy, and fat
• Being forced to train while injured, including, in one case, with two broken ankles
• Other verbal abuse including berating, threatening, demeaning, and insulting comments

Other coaches have also recently been exposed as abusive, such as Maggie Haney, Sabrina Picou, and Qi Han, all elite coaches of Olympic gymnasts. The philosophy of coaching reflected in these stories of abuse is grounded in the belief that coaches must have absolute power over their athletes and they must scare their young athletes into obedience. Macur cites Morinari Watanabe, the president of the International Gymnastics Federation, as saying this mentality of coaching is “an antiquated and dangerous way of coaching.” In fact, Macur notes that “some mental health experts say the recurring verbal abuse, including berating, ridiculing, threatening, demeaning and insulting, can be as harmful to young people as physical abuse or sexual abuse. It has also been linked to depression.”

Nonetheless, the USA Gymnastics organization and the International Gymnastics Federation continue to be very slow in following up on complaints, taking complaints of abuse seriously, and in changing the culture of coaching. It is unconscionable that young athletes continue to be subjected to this type of treatment. Let us keep our eyes open and support change in the culture of gymnastic sports.

Photo courtesy of William & Mary (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I am always pleased to stumble on an obituary for a woman who died long ago printed in the New York Times. The Times has been belatedly publishing these obituaries to make amends for overlooking the accomplishments of women in the past. Here are the stories of three more women who are new to me.

Charlotta Bass (1880–1969)

Charlotta Bass was the first Black woman to run for vice president of the United States on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952. Jessica Bennett of the New York Times notes that Bass’s shoulders are one of many that Kamala Harris now stands on. Even though Bass knew the chances of winning were small, her campaign slogan was “Win or Lose, We Win by Raising the Issues.”

Bennett notes that Bass led a remarkable life as an activist and journalist. Born in Sumpter, South Carolina, around 1880 to Kate and Hiram Spears, descendants of enslaved people, she moved to Rhode Island to attend college, then to Los Angeles, where she had a long career as editor and publisher of the California Eagle, the West Coast’s oldest Black newspaper. In the Eagle she denounced The Birth of a Nation, the movie made in 1915 that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. She used the paper to fight for equality for Black people in hiring and housing, along with other civil rights and labor issues. Her positions were considered radical at the time. She became the subject of government surveillance and was labeled “disloyal,” but she was able to bring many social justice issues into the national spotlight through publishing and running for state and national office.

Inez Milholland (1886–1916)

Inez Milholland was an ardent and talented advocate of women’s suffrage who was never mentioned in my history books. Meredith Mendelsohn, writing for the New York Times, shares that Milholland collapsed and died at the age of thirty after delivering fifty speaking engagements in eight states in twenty-eight days, where she urged her audiences to vote against Woodrow Wilson and for his opponent who supported suffrage. She pushed herself through illness to her detriment as she fought passionately for women’s rights, racial equality, labor reform, and prison reform and against WWI. The year she died, she led eight thousand women up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, during the first major suffrage parade.

Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (1895–1966)

Jia Lynn Yang writes that Mable Ping-Hua Lee stood out in 1912 as one of the leaders of one of the largest marches for women’s suffrage in the nation. She and a brigade of women on horseback led ten thousand people through the streets of New York City on a march for women’s right to vote. Lee stood out as a highly unusual suffragist as a Chinese immigrant.

Lee arrived in the United States from China in 1905 to join her missionary parents when she was ten. Very few Chinese were allowed into the United States at that time because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was not repealed until 1943.

While Lee’s mother seldom left their home in Chinatown because of her bound feet, Lee earned a doctorate in economics from Columbia University, published articles, and gave speeches in which, according to Yang, “she articulated a bold, transnational vision for democracy based on Christian values of equality.” She argued that suffrage was extending “democracy to women.”

Lee never realized her dream of returning to China to help liberate Chinese women, but she did help bring the right for women to vote in her adopted country.

Let’s take a moment to learn about the women who have helped pace the way for us.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons, Library of Congress, and George Grantham Bain (all public domain)