Status of women still abysmal: Let's create an extraordinary future for young women

I'm looking forward to hearing what the Women's Foundation of Minnesota finds out on its Road to Equality Tour. The foundation has done a terrific job of publicizing its research results during the past week. And the results are not surprising, women lag in wages, safety and security, health and reproductive rights, and political power. 

These depressing statistics are old news. Touring communities and finding out what people have to say about how to CHANGE women's lives is inspiring.

I want the young women who date my son, who are my nieces and students to have more options than I did. I have few regrets but lots of frustration about having to fight for things men take for granted, which is why I have great empathy for today's minorities who have to fight for what whites take for granted. 

I'll keep you posted on what solutions the Women's Foundation of Minnesota discovers. In a world that is facing so many depressing problems, I want to encourage people in my circles to focus on Solutions. If we take the energy we spend on Problems and turn it toward Solutions, this can be a decade that goes down in the books as a turning point rather than a spiraling downturn.

(From a recent Women's Foundation of Minn. Press Release) 2010 Road to Equality Tour - June 21-30, 2010 

To deepen its understanding of what the data looks like in communities across the state, the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota will visit seven cities on its 2010 Road to Equality Tour, June 21-30, including Warroad, Moorhead, Grand Rapids, Duluth, Willmar, St. Cloud and Rochester. The Foundation will present the data and gain community input. 

PDF downloads of the full report and summary of Status of Women & Girls in Minnesota and more information about the 2010 Road to Equality Tour is available at www.wfmn.org. 

Nick's salmen shark

Rosenblum's column today makes good point about dangers of keeping kids safe

As the mother of a kid in Alaska who is fishing for 300 lb. fish, sharks and hunting bears (I can't verify the bears because I confess I really don't want to know.), I appreciated Gail's piece in the Strib today, because it sees beyond the black and white borders of young sailor Abby Sunderland's story: http://tinyurl.com/2wdx3yy.

We do tend to go out of our way to keep our kids safe, sometimes at their own peril. Many of my son Nick's friends are hanging around the Twin Cities, jobless this summer. And I have to admit the dangers of urban bars and other temptations for bored young people make the wilds of Alaska more attractive from a Mom's perspective.

A couple weeks ago, he told me he was going to kayak on a glacier. "What does that mean?" I thought, quickly followed by "Do I really want to know?"

Last time he was in Alaska he told me he was going after a Salmen shark during his weekend off.
"This," I told him, "is the type of thing I'd like to hear about when you get back ... safely."

Ultimately, columnist Gail Rosenblum is right, every kid is different and parents' decisions need to account for that.

Columnist Ellen Goodman explains double-bind most women have experienced

Many of us have experienced the double-bind; we just didn’t know what to call it. Boston Globe and Washington Post columnist Ellen Goodman spoke to attendees this week at a fund-raising event sponsored by Women Winning, a Twin-Cities based advocacy group that supports female pro-choice candidates. See www.womenwinning.com.

She pointed out that we’ve made a lot of progress since her last visit to the Twin Cities in 2002, citing the victories of Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Still, she lamented, women are lagging farther behind in politics than in any other profession. Part of the reason for this, Goodman suggested, is that it’s easier to get into politics than it is to change it. But change it we must, because as she points out: Politics is where we change our values into policies.

She explained her perspective on what she calls “the double-bind”. Hillary had to prove she was tough enough to be commander in chief, while Obama’s feminine side helped win him votes.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had to prove she wasn’t biased, though the groups charged with selecting U.S. supreme court justices are all seriously under-represented by women.

The double-bind often shows up at work. A woman who chooses her kids over her work is told she doesn’t make her work a high enough priority, while a man who leaves work to attend a soccer game is congratulated.

It is extremely unfortunate that we don’t respect women’s traditional styles and choices. In the land of the free, is it too much to ask to be yourself without having to apologize for it?

Think of the talent we lose when women who are sick of the double-bind get fed up and drop out of work, politics or other male-dominated environs.

Ellen Goodman is one of the last of the grand dames of the opinion pages. She has now retired; syndicated columnist and author Molly Ivins is dead; only New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd http://tinyurl.com/n2y38u is left to carry on.

We need more great women columnists to generate opinions with the feminine perspective. When I worked at the Star Tribune Opinion pages, I was struck by how helpful it is to read someone’s opinions to help form your own. Without strong women’s voices, we’re left to form our opinions based primarily on male perspectives.

Unfortunately, most men don’t know much about the double-bind or other critical issues we deal with on a daily basis. So topics we care about never make it to traditional media pages. It’s unfair to us, and it will be the death knell for traditional media that must generate more audience members or perish.