Category: Equality of Opportunity

'How Much More Evil Can You Get?': Immigration Activists Brace For Upheaval

~ mcequality

She obviously won’t be missed, but in the greater context at the White House, her departure suggests there might be still worse to come. As multiple outlets have reported, Stephen Miller, the anti-immigration and rightwing extremist who designed the Muslim ban, is now exercising more influence over the country’s policy at the Southern border. Miller, in fact, reportedly pushed for Nielsen’s ouster and has been behind other recent and coming changes.

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Days before Nielsen’s resignation, Trump pulled his nomination of Ron Vitiello to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying: “We want to go in a tougher direction.” Miller “directly lobbied Trump to pull the nomination,” according to two White House officials, critical that Vitiello “was not fully in favor of closing the southern border, as Trump has threatened to do in recent days.”

via 'How Much More Evil Can You Get?': Immigration Activists Brace For Upheaval

Why UK child poverty targets won’t be met – BBC News

~ mcequality

If someone asked you what poverty was, you might think about how far someone’s pay packet goes. Can they afford their household bills? Can they ever go on holiday?
But rather than looking at how someone is making ends meet, the main way poverty is assessed is by using a relative measure – “relative poverty”.
It’s calculated by taking the median income in the country – that’s the midpoint where half of the working population earn more than that amount and half earn less. It was £569 a week in 2018.

via Why UK child poverty targets won’t be met – BBC News

Silicon Valley revolt: meet the tech workers fighting their bosses over Ice, censorship and racism | US news | The Guardian

~ mcequality

The Slack engineer who got thousands of tech workers to pledge not to build tools that target Muslims and immigrants
The election happens. The next day at the Slack office, people were quite literally sobbing in the cafeteria. I was mostly keeping my shit together until my parents called from Canada. I went into one of the little phone booths and just sobbed on the phone. It took a bit of time to grieve, but then you also have to act. The space that Maciej1 created in Tech Solidarity was incredibly important. To show up at that first meeting at the Stripe offices and see hundreds of other people who are figuring out what the hell to do next was incredibly gratifying. “Oh, Joe who works over at the security team at a text-editor company actually cares about the fate of Muslim people in America.” There were lots of pleasant surprises like that.

via Silicon Valley revolt: meet the tech workers fighting their bosses over Ice, censorship and racism | US news | The Guardian

‘Our goal is to halve the male suicide rate’: why no-frills therapy works for men | Life and style | The Guardian

~ mcequality

At the moment, the way we communicate about mental health is unhelpful to a large number of men. “Counselling is basically a female-friendly activity,” says Martin Seager, a clinical psychologist specialising in male mental health. “It’s not the standard way a bloke deals with his feelings, sitting down eyeball to eyeball and being asked: ‘Tell me how you feel.’”

Seager has 30 years’ experience in the NHS and is a partner in the Men And Boys Coalition, which aims to foster positive public discussion about masculinity. Their website is big on discrimination against men and boys, citing “structural challenges faced by men as parents, particularly new fathers and separated fathers; institutional responses to male victims of rape and domestic violence; and the disparity in approaches to male and female prisoners”.

I meet Seager in a cafe in central London. He is passionate about what he sees as the unjust narrative surrounding modern men. “I hate this term ‘toxic masculinity’,” he says. “The narrative goes that men are too preoccupied with being perceived as strong and that they need to soften up a bit to help themselves. What I am saying is, let’s change the narrative. So we still use the strong male archetype but suggest that seeking help and discussing your problems is the truly strong thing to do.”

via ‘Our goal is to halve the male suicide rate’: why no-frills therapy works for men | Life and style | The Guardian

Suicide on the Job Site – MEL Magazine

~ mcequality

hankfully, my dad’s experiences haven’t been as negative. The site he currently works on, the A14 Integrated Delivery Team — the U.K.’s biggest road construction project — even runs a peer-based support network of mental health ambassadors who actually work on the job site. These are staff members in all positions who are trained in mental health first aid. This training, delivered by Mental Health First Aid England, aims to give those who undertake it a deeper understanding of mental health, helping them to understand the signs and triggers of mental health issues so that they can direct them to the right services.

via Suicide on the Job Site – MEL Magazine

The pressure to be beautiful in Bangladesh – BBC News

~ mcequality

“As women we are often compelled to portray our beautiful selves,” says Habiba Nowrose, a 29-year-old photographer documenting the pressures on women in Bangladesh to be attractive.
“In that path to avail beauty we are made to strip off our individuality, stories and traumas.”
“We become anonymous even to ourselves and our identities remain concealed.”
The women in Habiba’s photos look bright and colourful but their faces are entirely covered, representing a loss of the inner self even though outwardly the women have made great efforts to look beautiful.

via The pressure to be beautiful in Bangladesh – BBC News

Public sex banned in two New Orleans gay bars investigation

~ mcequality

Two New Orleans leather bars known for their cruising scenes have been hit in recent months with charges, fines, and a shutdown in sexual activity (which is barred in public venues by Louisiana State Laws). Some have assumed that the impositions on Phoenix and Rawhide 2010 have been politically motivated, perhaps the result of a homophobic witch hunt (“an attack on one of us is an attack on all us,” read a message posted by Phoenix management on the bar’s Facebook in February), but a recent article in New Orleans LGBTQ magazine Ambush paints a more nuanced picture of investigations arising from direct complaints that are the result of community in-fighting and sexual discrimination.

via Public sex banned in two New Orleans gay bars investigation

Pay Gap Between Men and Women Might Be Worse Than Previously Calculated

~ mcequality

Today is Equal Pay Day, the day on which we acknowledge that a woman would have to work a full fifteen months to earn what a man in an equivalent role makes in a year. Since the wage gap is 80 cents to the dollar—that is, a woman earns 80 cents for every dollar a male peer earns—it takes women until April 2 to earn what men make between January and December. Many women of color have to work even longer to catch up to both their white male and their white female peers.

However, a recent study suggests that we might have to push Equal Pay Day a few more months down the road. As Vox reports:

“The commonly used figure to describe the gender wage ratio—that a woman earns 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man—understates the pay inequality problem by leaving many women workers out of the picture,” authors Stephen J. Rose, a labor economist and fellow at the Urban Institute, and Heidi I. Hartmann, the founder of IWPR and an economist in residence at American University, argue in their report, titled “Still a Man’s Labor Market.”Specifically, it leaves out women who have dropped out of the labor force temporarily, often to care for family.

via Pay Gap Between Men and Women Might Be Worse Than Previously Calculated

Inheritance tax loopholes allowing super-rich to pay lower rates | Business | The Guardian

~ mcequality

The UK’s super-rich pay half the rate of inheritance tax paid by the merely very rich, according to an analysis of HMRC data that throws fresh focus on how billionaires’ advisers use a “kitbag” of tricks to reduce heirs’ tax bills.

Estates worth £10m or more paid an average of 10% tax to the exchequer in the 2015-16 tax year compared with an average 20% tax paid by estates worth £2m-£3m, according to data released by HMRC following a freedom of information request by asset manager Canada Life.

The law states that estates should pay 40% tax on assets above £325,000 – or above £450,000 if the family home is given to children or grandchildren. But Neil Jones, the market development manager at Canada Life, said the richest of the rich often did not pay anywhere near that rate because they had access to “a myriad of potential solutions in an adviser’s kitbag to help mitigate IHT [inheritance tax]”.

via Inheritance tax loopholes allowing super-rich to pay lower rates | Business | The Guardian

Teacher Fired After Topless Photo Leaked to Students

~ mcequality

This year, Lauren Miranda, a 25-year-old middle-school teacher from Long Island, became eligible for tenure at her job. “I loved my job, I never woke up in the morning and didn’t want to go,” she recently told the press, adding “I really thought this is where I was going to spend the next thirty years of my life.” But last week, she was fired, after the South County School District in Bellport, Long Island caught wind that that an old topless photo of Miranda’s had been leaked to students.

The photo was taken three years ago, and according to local reports, Miranda says she sent it to her then-boyfriend, who taught in the same school district. Miranda says she does not know how the photo got into the hands of the students, and that the district discriminated against her because of her gender.

via Teacher Fired After Topless Photo Leaked to Students