Items related to The 51% Minority: How Women Still Are Not Equal and...
“Lis Wiehl tells us where the law protects us, and where it is letting us down. And as a bonus she gives us the tools to make change happen! If you care about where we are going, you have to read this book.”
–Rita Cosby, Emmy Award-winning TV host
Women make up 51% of the American population, yet still aren’t treated equally to men in areas that matter most. In this provocative new book, Lis Wiehl, one of the country’s top federal prosecutors, reveals the legal and social inequalities women must face in their daily lives–and provides a “Tool Box” for dealing with a variety of issues. From boardroom to courtroom, from pregnancy to contraception, from unequal pay to domestic violence, women are more often than not handed the short end of the stick.
· A woman earns seventy-three cents for every dollar a man makes.
· The law labels pregnancy a “disability.”
· Domestic violence remains the single biggest threat of injury to women in America.
· The federal government continues to increase funding for abstinence-only education, even though it’s proven to put our daughters at greater risk for unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
· Health insurance plans are more likely to cover Viagra prescriptions than birth control pills.
What’s worse, we’re also weighed down by a myriad of troubling attitudes: The media bombard us with images of young, perfect-bodied women; acid-tongued commentators label us “feminazi” if we try to claim equal treatment; and the current chief justice of the Supreme Court has a history of opposing legislative and legal attempts to strengthen women’s rights, and questions “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.”
Why are powerful women viewed with consternation while powerful men instill respect? Why is it that for every ten men in an executive, decision-making role in this country, there is only one woman in that same role? Why do our federal courts continue to be stacked with male judges even though women receive more than half of all law degrees? And why shouldn’t a woman be president?
Enough! Women are not equal in our society or under our laws and the remedy is quite simple: Besides being the majority of the population, we also control the economy, spending 80 percent of every discretionary dollar, and given that 54 percent of voters are female, we can swing an election. With our numbers we can do something about it.
This is a critical moment: We can either take the road toward equality or allow ourselves to be driven further away from fair treatment. The 51% Minority is a clarion call to the silent majority to take a stand . . . before it’s too late.
–Rita Cosby, Emmy Award-winning TV host
Women make up 51% of the American population, yet still aren’t treated equally to men in areas that matter most. In this provocative new book, Lis Wiehl, one of the country’s top federal prosecutors, reveals the legal and social inequalities women must face in their daily lives–and provides a “Tool Box” for dealing with a variety of issues. From boardroom to courtroom, from pregnancy to contraception, from unequal pay to domestic violence, women are more often than not handed the short end of the stick.
· A woman earns seventy-three cents for every dollar a man makes.
· The law labels pregnancy a “disability.”
· Domestic violence remains the single biggest threat of injury to women in America.
· The federal government continues to increase funding for abstinence-only education, even though it’s proven to put our daughters at greater risk for unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
· Health insurance plans are more likely to cover Viagra prescriptions than birth control pills.
What’s worse, we’re also weighed down by a myriad of troubling attitudes: The media bombard us with images of young, perfect-bodied women; acid-tongued commentators label us “feminazi” if we try to claim equal treatment; and the current chief justice of the Supreme Court has a history of opposing legislative and legal attempts to strengthen women’s rights, and questions “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good.”
Why are powerful women viewed with consternation while powerful men instill respect? Why is it that for every ten men in an executive, decision-making role in this country, there is only one woman in that same role? Why do our federal courts continue to be stacked with male judges even though women receive more than half of all law degrees? And why shouldn’t a woman be president?
Enough! Women are not equal in our society or under our laws and the remedy is quite simple: Besides being the majority of the population, we also control the economy, spending 80 percent of every discretionary dollar, and given that 54 percent of voters are female, we can swing an election. With our numbers we can do something about it.
This is a critical moment: We can either take the road toward equality or allow ourselves to be driven further away from fair treatment. The 51% Minority is a clarion call to the silent majority to take a stand . . . before it’s too late.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Lis Wiehl is one of the nation’s most prominent trial lawyers and highly regarded commentators. The author of Winning Every Time, she is also the legal analyst on the Fox News Channel and Bill O’Reilly’s co-host and sparring partner on Radio Factor. A graduate of Harvard Law, Wiehl has never lost a case. She lives with her husband and two children in Westchester County, New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1
EQUAL = EQUAL
“I have the right to be president and mommy”
There’s much speculation that we’ll have a woman running for president of the United States as early as 2008. According to a Siena College Research Institute survey, 81 percent of voters across the country are ready to vote for a woman for president, 62 percent say the country is ready for a woman president, and 52 percent of voters feel that a president’s gender wouldn’t matter when it came to foreign affairs.
In the 86 years we’ve been able to vote, only one woman has been on a major party ticket: Geraldine Ferraro as running mate to Walter Mondale in 1984. “Even God herself couldn’t have changed that outcome with the Reagan ticket,” Ferraro says, reflecting on that election. “But I’ll tell you, if a woman were president today, we wouldn’t be at war in Iraq. And though the administration didn’t cause Hurricane Katrina, a woman would have responded differently—the response would have been immediate, with much more empathy, and the guys who screwed up would have been fired immediately.”
In her book Closing the Leadership Gap, White House Project founder Marie Wilson quotes the Rev. Patricia Kitchen: “For over 200 years, the United States has been steered by male leadership who tend to lead from a self-centered, self-preservation perspective. Women around the world are inclined to lead, their families and nations, from an other-centered perspective.”
“For the most part women are much more collaborative and inclusive,” Washington governor Christine Gregoire said. “Women won’t just announce a decision—it’s going to be done this way or that way. We have the attitude of ‘Let’s try to talk through the issues,’ which avoids confrontation and controversy. That’s my style and I’ve observed it in a lot of women.”
“Outsiders often bring clarity of vision, as well as a sense of discovery and innovation,” Anna Quindlen wrote in her “Last Word” column for Newsweek’s special report on how women lead. “Women are not the only ones capable of this. But the difficulties they’ve encountered while seeking representation and respect may provide the steel and strength needed to embrace change. You’re less wedded to the shape of the table if you haven’t been permitted to sit at it.”
At the table of leaders and decision makers, we remain outsiders. For every ten men in executive roles in this country there is only one woman, a number that has changed little in twenty years. As for those who sit in judgment of the cases that establish legal precedent in this country, there are 629 male federal judges, 199 female. And in the history of our country 98.25 percent of our senators have been men.
What has this male dominated leadership decided? That they’ll let us know what we can and can’t do. Instead of making it easier on women, the Bush administration has made decisions that have made
being a woman even harder. During this administration, child care programs have been underfunded and undermined, making such drastic cuts that only one out of seven children eligible for federal child care assistance receives help. By the Bush administration’s own estimates, this change will result in 300,000 children losing child care assistance by 2009. This isn’t helping children, this isn’t helping women, and this isn’t helping our society.
This administration’s tax cuts have also affected women and children. In addition to the drastic cuts in child care programs, programs such as housing subsidies, Pell grants to help pay for college, and aid to state and local governments have been slashed in order to pay for these cuts. The average tax cut for millionaires was about $113,000 in 2003, five times the income that a typical single mother with children lives on for an entire year.
Think that’s bad? According to the National Women’s Law Center, it gets worse:
· The administration ended the equal pay initiative and has removed all materials on narrowing the wage gap from the Department of Labor’s website. The Department of Justice has also dropped cases challenging sex discrimination in employment.
· The Department of Education has “archived” all Title IX guidance on preventing sexual harassment in schools, making it unavailable to administrators and parents trying to protect children from sexual harassment.
· The administration has placed individuals hostile to women’s interests on advisory bodies, such as those responsible for domestic violence and reproductive health.
· The administration proposed cutting funding to emergency shelters, crisis hotlines, and other domestic violence services to 26 percent below previously authorized levels.
· The administration’s plan to “restructure” Medicaid, changing it from an entitlement program to a block grant, will result in more women without health insurance.
· For the first time in history, states can now deny contraception and family planning services to poor women.
· The administration has backed laws criminalizing abortion, while cutting out family planning programs vital to women’s health.
· Medical research is being undermined and scientific information distorted to serve an anti-abortion and anti-family- planning agenda. For example, the National Cancer Institute posted information on its website that falsely suggested there’s a link between abortion and breast cancer.
“The administration’s policies are reversing progress for women and girls across the board,” Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, said. “The few positive steps the administration has taken to help women are overshadowed by the overwhelming number of proposals that hurt them.”
Perhaps most troubling is the fact that President Bush has appointed to the Supreme Court and federal courts judicial nominees who oppose critical rights for women and girls. Since federal judges are appointed for life, they have the opportunity to affect generations. Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, who has consistently voted against the protections of Roe v. Wade, was appointed by President Reagan in 1986, when Scalia was fifty. It should not go unnoticed that President George W. Bush has consistently appointed younger, conservative judges.
His new appointments to the Supreme Court (two males—age fifty and fifty-five—to replace one male and one female) have consistently opposed women’s rights, and their judicial philosophies seem against our progress toward equality. During his years as a legal adviser to President Reagan, new chief justice John G. Roberts Jr. opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women’s rights, questioning “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good” and disparaging “the purported gender gap.” In internal memos to Reagan that surfaced during his confirmation hearings, Roberts encouraged ignoring the Equal Rights Amendment that was pending in Congress and said that directing employers to give equal pay to women as men in jobs of “comparable worth” was “staggeringly pernicious” and “anti-capitalist.”
As a Justice Department attorney, Justice Samuel Alito (President Bush’s replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor) wrote a memo laying out a proposal for the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade. On the bench, Judge Alito voted in favor of upholding a provision in the 1982 Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act that required married women considering an abortion to notify their husbands. Judge Alito’s opinions in sexual discrimination and sexual harassment cases demonstrated his desire to make it easier for judges to dismiss cases before they ever get to a jury, and he wrote the Third Circuit decision that Congress did not have the power to require state governments to comply with the Family and Medical Leave Act. Fortunately, three years later the Supreme Court disagreed. But now he’s one of them.
TAKING THE LEAD
Around the world, women are proving that we do make a difference when we’re in positions of power. Court TV’s Catherine Crier recalled a women’s seminar she moderated during which several members of Congress, writers, and businesswomen were asked what they’d do if they were president of the United States. “Asked to summarize at meeting’s end, I said that all the participants described their issues and policies in terms of ‘stewardship.’ None of them talked about manipulating power for power’s sake or acquiring money or influence. I do believe this is a female perspective—one the world needs desperately. Women truly think in terms of future generations and the vast majority would put more effort into addressing education, health care, and poverty. Imagine women working to preserve the environment and therefore pushing energy independence and freedom from fossil fuels. Imagine how they would negotiate issues of war and peace before sending their sons and daughters into battle.”
Though no woman has ever been nominated, we do have the right to be president of the United States—well, sort of. Article 2, section 1, clause 5 of the Constitution states: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” (Clause 1 says: “He shall hold his Office durin...
EQUAL = EQUAL
“I have the right to be president and mommy”
There’s much speculation that we’ll have a woman running for president of the United States as early as 2008. According to a Siena College Research Institute survey, 81 percent of voters across the country are ready to vote for a woman for president, 62 percent say the country is ready for a woman president, and 52 percent of voters feel that a president’s gender wouldn’t matter when it came to foreign affairs.
In the 86 years we’ve been able to vote, only one woman has been on a major party ticket: Geraldine Ferraro as running mate to Walter Mondale in 1984. “Even God herself couldn’t have changed that outcome with the Reagan ticket,” Ferraro says, reflecting on that election. “But I’ll tell you, if a woman were president today, we wouldn’t be at war in Iraq. And though the administration didn’t cause Hurricane Katrina, a woman would have responded differently—the response would have been immediate, with much more empathy, and the guys who screwed up would have been fired immediately.”
In her book Closing the Leadership Gap, White House Project founder Marie Wilson quotes the Rev. Patricia Kitchen: “For over 200 years, the United States has been steered by male leadership who tend to lead from a self-centered, self-preservation perspective. Women around the world are inclined to lead, their families and nations, from an other-centered perspective.”
“For the most part women are much more collaborative and inclusive,” Washington governor Christine Gregoire said. “Women won’t just announce a decision—it’s going to be done this way or that way. We have the attitude of ‘Let’s try to talk through the issues,’ which avoids confrontation and controversy. That’s my style and I’ve observed it in a lot of women.”
“Outsiders often bring clarity of vision, as well as a sense of discovery and innovation,” Anna Quindlen wrote in her “Last Word” column for Newsweek’s special report on how women lead. “Women are not the only ones capable of this. But the difficulties they’ve encountered while seeking representation and respect may provide the steel and strength needed to embrace change. You’re less wedded to the shape of the table if you haven’t been permitted to sit at it.”
At the table of leaders and decision makers, we remain outsiders. For every ten men in executive roles in this country there is only one woman, a number that has changed little in twenty years. As for those who sit in judgment of the cases that establish legal precedent in this country, there are 629 male federal judges, 199 female. And in the history of our country 98.25 percent of our senators have been men.
What has this male dominated leadership decided? That they’ll let us know what we can and can’t do. Instead of making it easier on women, the Bush administration has made decisions that have made
being a woman even harder. During this administration, child care programs have been underfunded and undermined, making such drastic cuts that only one out of seven children eligible for federal child care assistance receives help. By the Bush administration’s own estimates, this change will result in 300,000 children losing child care assistance by 2009. This isn’t helping children, this isn’t helping women, and this isn’t helping our society.
This administration’s tax cuts have also affected women and children. In addition to the drastic cuts in child care programs, programs such as housing subsidies, Pell grants to help pay for college, and aid to state and local governments have been slashed in order to pay for these cuts. The average tax cut for millionaires was about $113,000 in 2003, five times the income that a typical single mother with children lives on for an entire year.
Think that’s bad? According to the National Women’s Law Center, it gets worse:
· The administration ended the equal pay initiative and has removed all materials on narrowing the wage gap from the Department of Labor’s website. The Department of Justice has also dropped cases challenging sex discrimination in employment.
· The Department of Education has “archived” all Title IX guidance on preventing sexual harassment in schools, making it unavailable to administrators and parents trying to protect children from sexual harassment.
· The administration has placed individuals hostile to women’s interests on advisory bodies, such as those responsible for domestic violence and reproductive health.
· The administration proposed cutting funding to emergency shelters, crisis hotlines, and other domestic violence services to 26 percent below previously authorized levels.
· The administration’s plan to “restructure” Medicaid, changing it from an entitlement program to a block grant, will result in more women without health insurance.
· For the first time in history, states can now deny contraception and family planning services to poor women.
· The administration has backed laws criminalizing abortion, while cutting out family planning programs vital to women’s health.
· Medical research is being undermined and scientific information distorted to serve an anti-abortion and anti-family- planning agenda. For example, the National Cancer Institute posted information on its website that falsely suggested there’s a link between abortion and breast cancer.
“The administration’s policies are reversing progress for women and girls across the board,” Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, said. “The few positive steps the administration has taken to help women are overshadowed by the overwhelming number of proposals that hurt them.”
Perhaps most troubling is the fact that President Bush has appointed to the Supreme Court and federal courts judicial nominees who oppose critical rights for women and girls. Since federal judges are appointed for life, they have the opportunity to affect generations. Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, who has consistently voted against the protections of Roe v. Wade, was appointed by President Reagan in 1986, when Scalia was fifty. It should not go unnoticed that President George W. Bush has consistently appointed younger, conservative judges.
His new appointments to the Supreme Court (two males—age fifty and fifty-five—to replace one male and one female) have consistently opposed women’s rights, and their judicial philosophies seem against our progress toward equality. During his years as a legal adviser to President Reagan, new chief justice John G. Roberts Jr. opposed legal and legislative attempts to strengthen women’s rights, questioning “whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good” and disparaging “the purported gender gap.” In internal memos to Reagan that surfaced during his confirmation hearings, Roberts encouraged ignoring the Equal Rights Amendment that was pending in Congress and said that directing employers to give equal pay to women as men in jobs of “comparable worth” was “staggeringly pernicious” and “anti-capitalist.”
As a Justice Department attorney, Justice Samuel Alito (President Bush’s replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor) wrote a memo laying out a proposal for the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade. On the bench, Judge Alito voted in favor of upholding a provision in the 1982 Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act that required married women considering an abortion to notify their husbands. Judge Alito’s opinions in sexual discrimination and sexual harassment cases demonstrated his desire to make it easier for judges to dismiss cases before they ever get to a jury, and he wrote the Third Circuit decision that Congress did not have the power to require state governments to comply with the Family and Medical Leave Act. Fortunately, three years later the Supreme Court disagreed. But now he’s one of them.
TAKING THE LEAD
Around the world, women are proving that we do make a difference when we’re in positions of power. Court TV’s Catherine Crier recalled a women’s seminar she moderated during which several members of Congress, writers, and businesswomen were asked what they’d do if they were president of the United States. “Asked to summarize at meeting’s end, I said that all the participants described their issues and policies in terms of ‘stewardship.’ None of them talked about manipulating power for power’s sake or acquiring money or influence. I do believe this is a female perspective—one the world needs desperately. Women truly think in terms of future generations and the vast majority would put more effort into addressing education, health care, and poverty. Imagine women working to preserve the environment and therefore pushing energy independence and freedom from fossil fuels. Imagine how they would negotiate issues of war and peace before sending their sons and daughters into battle.”
Though no woman has ever been nominated, we do have the right to be president of the United States—well, sort of. Article 2, section 1, clause 5 of the Constitution states: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” (Clause 1 says: “He shall hold his Office durin...
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- PublisherBallantine Books
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0345469216
- ISBN 13 9780345469212
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages288
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The 51% Minority: How Women Still Are Not Equal and What You Can Do About It
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