Saturday Newsletter
Hello! Welcome to this week’s edition of Au Fait. If you enjoy this issue, please consider forwarding it to a friend!
1. Hello? This Is Colombia’s Anti-machismo Hotline.
An ingenius phone hotline in Colombia takes calls from men struggling with emotions that they don’t know how to manage, thanks to being raised with toxic ideas about masculinity. The hotline is called the Calm Line. It was started by Claudia López, the first woman and the first openly gay mayor of Bogotá, the relatively liberal capital. Its goal is fighting violence against women, but instead of focusing on women, it puts men at the center of the conversation, in an effort to teach them to understand their emotions and control their actions. Read the full story here.
2. This Is What It’s Like To Be the Only Trans Woman in Elite Motorsport
This weekend is the US Formula 1 Grand Prix, so we thought it fitting to include a story about Charlie Martin. Charlie began racing relatively late in life, in her early 20s. About a decade into her career, she decided to publicly come out as trans. Check out this interview with her here, about her decision to transition in her 30s, as well as her goal to become to first trans driver to compete in Le Mans.
3. Oklahoma Woman Convicted of Manslaughter, Gets Four Years After Miscarriage
Brittney Poolaw was about 17 weeks pregnant when she miscarried in January 2020 and sought medical help. She was charged with manslaughter in the first degree and arrested after she was found to have been using methamphetamine, even though her meth addiction was not the cause of her miscarriage. We can’t imagine the guilt and stress of learning you’re pregnant while struggling with an addiction, let alone then being forced to spend years in jail after losing your child. If your blood isn’t boiling yet, please read this article, which details the stories of additional women in recent years who were criminally prosecuted for their miscarriages.
4. ‘I feel hurt that my life has ended up here’: The Women Who Are Involuntary Celibates
Incels, a portmanteau meaning “involuntary celibates,” are associated with an online movement marked by male violence and extreme misogyny. There have been numerous attacks by men who identify with incel culture, such as Elliot Rodger’s six murders in California in 2014. But, what about women who are involuntarily celibate? The incel movement believes that women can have sex whenever they want, but as many women will testify, that is simply not the case. This is especially untrue for women who do not meet society’s narrow definitions of beauty, but instead of projecting their loneliness outward and blaming others for “denying” them sex, “femcels” often blame themselves. Read the full story here.
5. ‘He lives freely, I live in fear’: The Plight of India’s Abandoned Wives
Each year, thousands of men leave India to work abroad. The country has one of the largest diasporas – nearly 32 million Indians or people of Indian origin live abroad. Many of these men return home to marry, facing pressure to marry within their community of origin. Some women and their families consider it prestigious to marry a man with a job abroad, believing that eventually they will join him and have better opportunities themselves. But for thousands of Indian women, their husbands abandon them, living a totally separate life (sometimes with a second wife and family) in their new country. This leaves Indian women in a terrible limbo, where they are not divorced and so cannot remarry, but also carry the stigma of an absent husband. Read the full story here.
6. What the Appointment of 98 Female Judges to Egypt's State Council Means for Women's Rights
The State Council, established in 1946, is an independent judicial body and one of the pillars of the judicial authority in Egypt. Only about 30 women have been appointed to the State Council in the past century, and these appointments more than double the number of women judges in Egypt’s entire judicial system. This a huge leap forward, especially considering the increased resistence to women’s rights since the Arab Spring. Even so, women are still less than 0.5% of all the judges in Egypt’s court. Read the full story here.
7. Percentage of Women in News as Subjects, Sources, Drops to 14% in 2020 in India
We thought this report was fascinating. “There was also a sharp decline of women in news sources in 2020. Women news sources,” the report said, “continued to be drawn from occupations outside the core of the power structure, such as the entertainment sector and the social work/social activism sector.” Women’s function as spokesperson also dropped to eight percent in 2020 from 15 percent in 2015. The pandemic affected these numbers, according to the report, with more women than men in journalism electing to stay at home. Read the full story here.
8. First Female Head of Japan Labor Lobby Vows to Empower Women
The first female president of Japan’s powerful labor union federation announced last week that she will work to correct the gender gap in wages and working conditions to help empower women. Japan placed 120th out of 156 nations in this year’s gender gap ranking by the World Economic Forum. “A society that provides a pleasant working environment for women will be pleasant for everyone,” she said. Read the full story here.
9. Modi’s ‘Gamechanger’ Palm Oil Push Raises Concerns for Indian Forests and Women
India’s prime minister Narendra Modi plans to expand palm oil production in the region, saying it can be a “gamechanger” for the economy and boost the nation’s self-reliance. But in areas that have pioneered palm oil production, it has brought little wealth at a heavy cost for the environment and workers. Deforestation is a huge concern, but there is also a disproportionate effect on women. Farming palm oil is extremely labor intensive and means a shift from traditional farm practices to monoculture farms.
“In monoculture farming, women are the ones who are at loss, primarily because it takes place in big chunks of lands which are mostly entitled to the male’s name,” said a professor of gender and development studies at the University of East Anglia. “The cash which comes from monoculture farming comes in bulk and goes to the men in the family, so there is less petty cash left for the woman in the house.”
Read the full story here.
10. Women Do More to Tackle Climate Change than Men
Also on the topic of environmentalism, a study was released this week that says women have made greater changes to their personal habits to tackle climate change than men have. Women are more easily motivated than men to change personal habits like recycling, buying local, and reducing water and meat consumption to reduce their carbon footprint. Also in the survey, 69 percent of women reported feeling burnout, anxiety or depression as a result of the pandemic, 11 percentage points higher than for men. Read the full story here.