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Culture>Embarrassing
Africa | Burundi | Crimes

Merck Wants To ‘Empower’ Infertile Women In Africa. Can Music Videos Help?

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In June, an unusual email arrived in the inbox of an NPR global health correspondent. The headline was: "Merck Foundation together with First Lady of Burundi release 'Plus Qu'une Mere' an empowering French Song as courtesy to all infertile women in Burundi and Africa." The email had a link to a video of a performance with an all-female choir. Wearing traditional African clothing printed with the Merck Foundation's logo, they sing a song with lyrics that encourage people not to blame women for infertility. They're performing before an audience of maybe a hundred people, most of them in
Middle East | UAE | Culture

Almost 100 men fined each day on Dubai Metro for using women’s carriage

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Metro inspectors are fining almost 100 men a day for entering women-only coaches, making it the penalty most commonly incurred by passengers, trumping sneaking into gold class, chewing gum or drinking water. Since March, the Roads and Transport Authority has warned commuters that men will face a Dh100 fine if they intrude into the women and children space on the trains. Large pink signs inside coaches and on platforms clearly mark out the area, although this has not stopped many men from boarding.
Middle East | Saudi Arabia | Culture

Saudi cleric’s fatwa: Women only watch soccer to look at men’s thighs

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A Saudi cleric has issued a fatwa (religious edict) stating that women only watched soccer to stare at men’s thighs, Al Arabiya reported on Saturday. The imam said it should be forbidden for women to watch football games and they “do not care who wins the match, all they care about is watching the player’s thighs.” He added that a “woman seeing a foreign man is sinful, so what about seeing his thighs and tight kit?” The fatwa garnered criticism on social media, including a trending hashtag on twitter in Arabic translating to: #women_love_football_because_of_players'_thighs
North America | United States | Business

Women in the world: Where the U.S. falters in quest for equality

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It's considered an "international bill of rights for women." It promises to end discrimination, establish equality and fight against violence. Nearly all the 193 member states of the United Nations have ratified it. Only seven haven't: Iran, Palau, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tonga. And the United States. The Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women -- or CEDAW, as it's known -- was adopted by the United Nations in 1979. It's the biggest treaty creating specific guarantees for women and girls since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established in 1948, when
North America | United States | Culture

Congresswoman Called ‘Exotic’ And ‘Beautiful’ In Article On Foreign Policy Experience

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A new article in the National Review, ostensibly about the foreign policy stances of Hawaii House member Tulsi Gabbard, begins: “She’s young, she’s hip, and she’s beautiful. She’s also a combat veteran and a Democrat.” This is just under the headline, which reads: “Meet the Beautiful, Tough Young Democrat Who’s Turning Heads by Challenging Obama’s Foreign Policy.” The authors then go on to discuss Gabbard’s “exotic background” — she is from American Samoa — before getting to her legislative record and policy views, highlighting several times she has criticized
Asia | China | Culture

China rejects calls to free women’s rights activists

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China has rejected calls from several foreign governments to free five women's rights activists who have spent nearly three weeks in detention. Foreign ministry spokesman Hua Chunying said that nobody had the right to ask China to release the group. The activists were planning public campaigns against sexual harassment. They were arrested in early March in the run-up to China's top political meetings, which coincided with International Women's Day. The BBC's Celia Hatton in Beijing says grassroots groups in China have been reporting a marked rise in the detention of political activists
South Asia | Australia | Culture

Liberals are only half as good as Labor on the question of women

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Since the recent Queensland election, we have a situation where the NSW Parliament has the lowest proportion of female parliamentarians in Australia. One in four parliamentarians (24 per cent) are women. This low participation rate is often reported in shocked surprise but no further analysis occurs. The 2011 state election delivered NSW a seriously women-deficient Parliament where 14 out of 34 Labor MPs were women but only 17 out of a massive 88 Coalition MPs were female. This translates to 41 per cent of Labor MPs are women compared to a lowly 19 per cent of Coalition MPs. Sometimes in
Latin America | Mexico | Culture

Mexican Mayor Says Women Should Be Watching Soap Operas, Not The News

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The mayor of the northern Mexican city of Chihuahua is taking heat for urging a crowd of women to watch soap operas instead of the news during a speech delivered Sunday. During an event to mark the Day of the Domestic Worker, Javier Garfio Pacheco of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party led a raffle for a plasma-screen television and went on to praise them, saying they're the best units for watching soap operas -- or “telenovelas” -- during breaks from work. “No news -- because the news isn’t so good,” Garfio Pacheco said in the speech, while shaking his finger at a
North America | United States | Culture

In One GIF, This 20-Year-Old Shows How Powerful Women Can Be

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The current Olympic weightlifter told The Huffington Post she joined Crossfit right after graduating high school in 2012. As a former cheerleader and runner, Sperry says she was "very muscular" when she was younger and thought that "being muscular was something to be ashamed of. I thought it made me less feminine or less beautiful than other women," she said. As she got older, however, Sperry learned to accept everything about her body -- especially her muscles. "I realize how important it is to not stereotype a certain body image as 'perfect," she said. "All body types are unique and not e
Middle East | Israel | Culture

Why this chocolate bar has outraged women in Israel

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In Israel, one political party is learning the hard way that the way to woo women voters is not by playing up sexist stereotypes. The Yahads, an ultra-Orthodox political party, recently offered women supporters a surprise at a campaign rally: chocolate bars.Though the “ladies be chocoholics” inference here is bad enough, the wrapper is what has made women across the country speak out against the party’s leadership. Each chocolate bar’s wrapper included cleaning tips for Passover: “Divide your Passover cleaning into 20 individual tasks that are easy to complete. Each time you fin
North America | United States | Culture

Former NBC News Reporter Lisa Myers: Television Journalism Is Deteriorating, “has all the depth of Twitter.”

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Lisa Myers, an NBC News veteran who retired in 2014, is scheduled to give a speech in Des Moines about her career in television. And her diagnosis of the industry as it currently stands is, shall we say, unflattering. “I am going to talk about the deterioration in the quality of journalism you see on TV,” she told the Des Moines Register. “There is less and less interest in network television today holding the White House or any other part of government accountable. I fear there is a calculation that the audiences they are trying to reach don’t care that much about the serious news.
North America | United States | Business

Google chairman gets called out for cutting off a woman while talking about diversity

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On Monday, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and acclaimed Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson were wrapping up a SXSW Interactive panel that had focused on diversity, when an audience member called out the two men for repeatedly interrupting their fellow panelist, the United States' Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith. Even more awkward? The audience member who posed the question was apparently Judith Williams, who heads up Google's unconscious bias program. During a Q&A session with the audience, Williams, who is Google's Global Diversity and Talent Programs manager, asked
North America | United States | Business

Silicon Valley’s diversity problem goes beyond hiring practices

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Workplace diversity advocates hope to shine a spotlight on the industry’s hiring efforts, which remain abysmal. At Twitter, only 10 percent of tech jobs in its global workforce belong to women. Among its U.S. employees, just 4 percent of those lucrative positions are filled by black or Latino people. The numbers aren’t much different at places like Facebook, Google and Yahoo. Even Apple, which can point to above-average diversity, still counts just 20 percent of its tech hires as female, and black or Latino workers make up only 13 percent. Anecdotes of implicit gender bias reinforce wha
South Asia | Afghanistan | Culture

98% of girls in Afghan province deprived of education

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Strong conservative traditions are hindering education for women in Afghanistan’s southeastern Paktika province. Only 2 percent of females go to school. The province is a multi-ethnic tribal society with a population of about 413,800. Provincial director of women affairs Bibi Hawa Khoshiwal said that 98 percent of the girls are deprived of education in Paktika province despite the fact that there are schools that they can attend.

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