NYU Wagner

Women are stunningly underrepresented in op-ed journalism, be it in print or in television punditry, is hardly news. According to the White House Project, women represent only 16% of the guests on Sunday morning political shows. In the first five months of 2008 the Washington Post op-ed page ran 654 columns by op-ed contributors, and 84% of those contributors were men. And the Post certainly wasn't the worst offender - according to data collected by The Op-Ed Project, a mere 6.8% of op-ed columns contributed to the Wall Street Journal between August and October of 2009 were written by women.

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Men outnumber women on top U.S. boards of directors six to one, a ratio unchanged in 2009 from the year before, said research released on Wednesday.

Women held 15.2 percent of the seats on U.S. boards of directors this year and last, according to Catalyst, an organization that works to advance women in business.

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Is it enough to say that women deserve to be elected to high office as a matter of sheer equity? Women are 51 percent of the US population, after all, but just 17 percent of the US Senate. That's unfair on its face.

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Over the past 40 years, women have gone from underrepresented minority to overrepresented majority on U.S. college campuses, where they outnumber men by a proportion approaching 60-40. Barriers that kept women from college have been swept away, and scholarly focus has shifted to the impediments facing men, who are more likely to drop out of school and more apt to go into the military, manual-labor jobs or prison.

Civil rights investigators will request a range of data from each of the chosen schools to determine the relative academic merits of male and female applicants who were admitted, wait-listed or rejected, as well as the kind and amount of aid offered to applicants. The investigation might lead to a public briefing with witness testimony, or it could end less dramatically with only a written report.

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Researchers at New York University who examined the relationship between subprime lending and race released a report on Thursday that found that the probability that individual borrowers receive risky, high-cost subprime loans increases depending on the racial composition of the neighborhood or metropolitan area where they live.

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Although the welfare reform President Clinton signed into law seemed like a success, the recent recession has revealed just how deeply flawed it was from the beginning and has left many people unprepared for hard times.

The caseload for TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the name we now give welfare) is about 5 million people. This number is up by about 1 million since the beginning of the recession, but it's still just a little over a third of what it was 15 years ago, before welfare reform.

According to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, the number of homeless Americans is up by 61 percent since the recession began in December 2007. That figure will only continue to rise. The number of people living in poverty increased by 2.5 million during the first year of the recession, and it has surely risen further in 2009. The government reported recently that nearly 50 million Americans are experiencing what it delicately calls "food insecurity."

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Women are 51% of the voting public. Thus there can be only two reasons why women are so egregiously under-represented in the US Senate (17% women) and why Massachusetts has never had a female US senator in its history: Either women haven't run for office so it was impossible to elect them, or women ran but not enough women voted for them to get them elected. In politics generally, evidence supports both statements.

Psychologists have long understood the strange fact of unconscious gender bias from studies that show that both men and women slightly undervalue otherwise identical work if they think it was done by a woman. In the last two years they have extended this research to analyze why women, like men, penalize successful women and have difficulty accepting them as leaders. Regardless of the reasons, the reality of the phenomenon persists today.

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On December 3, women and men around the world are celebrating the 30th anniversary of CEDAW, the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Within the existing patriarchal order, CEDAW is a revolutionary document, unique in its perception of women as full human beings.

We all should support and join actions to have the Convention ratified by the U.S. Congress. After all, the Convention sets out internationally accepted principles that would be legally binding in the United States after ratification.

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The Senate voted Thursday to require health insurance companies to provide free mammograms and other preventive services to women.

Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, who proposed the coverage requirement as an amendment to sweeping health legislation, said it could save millions of lives.

"My amendment would eliminate one of the major barriers to care by getting rid of high co-payments and deductibles," Ms. Mikulski said. "It does not tell women, 'You will have a mammogram at 40.' It says, 'You will have access to that mammogram if you and your doctor decide it's medically necessary or medically appropriate.' "

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According to the new report by the Center for Health Policy Research at the University of California, Los Angeles,low-income women not yet old enough for Medicare are four times more likely to be in poor or fair health--especially those in middle age and from ethnic backgrounds.

The study concluded that for lower-income women, "their limited discretionary income, combined with their poorer health status, reinforces the urgency of effective and consistent health insurance coverage and access to health services for all."

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