McDonald’s Workers to Go on 1-Day Strike Over Sexual Harassment

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

For Kim Lawson, who began working at a McDonald’s in Kansas City, Missouri last year, sexual harassment seemed to come with the job. Almost immediately after she started, she said, a coworker began brushing up against her numerous times and went out of his way to be near her, always standing too close. He would give her gifts, something he didn’t do to anyone else they worked with. But when she told a manager about her coworker’s behavior, no action was taken: “He still worked the same shift. He was still around,” Lawson told Jezebel. The experience soured her on reporting any harassment, so when a night shift manager began hitting on her, making lewd comments about her body, she felt like saying anything would be useless. And since he was a manager, she said, “I felt like I had to be nice about it.”

via McDonald’s Workers to Go on 1-Day Strike Over Sexual Harassment

‘Sexist, unsafe’ world experienced by young girls – BBC News

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

An “alarmingly high” number of girls and young women feel unsafe outside their home, according to annual research for Girlguiding UK.
The survey of 1,903 13 to 21-year-olds in the UK found nearly two-thirds either felt unsafe, or knew someone who was fearful walking home alone.
More than half had suffered harassment, or knew someone who had, it said.
But girls are responding more robustly than before and were also more likely to call themselves feminists, it said.
The research, the tenth over as many years, found more girls claim to understand what feminism means, with almost half saying they are feminists – up from a third in 2013.
One young woman, from the 11 to 16-year-old age group, told researchers a feminist was “a person who strongly believes in gender equality and that everyone no matter their background should be treated equally.”

via ‘Sexist, unsafe’ world experienced by young girls – BBC News

Spotify sued for gender discrimination and equal pay violation | Music | The Guardian

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

A former Spotify sales executive is suing the music streaming giant for gender discrimination, equal pay violation and defamation. Hong Perez alleges that the Swedish company systematically discriminated against female employees, Variety reports.

Perez alleges that her former boss, the US head of sales Brian Berner, took only male employees to the Sundance independent film festival in 2016 and 17. She says employees spoke of “drug use” on these “boys’ trips” and alleges that one man got into a physical fight during one. She claims these trips excluded more senior women.

via Spotify sued for gender discrimination and equal pay violation | Music | The Guardian

Bravo Reality TV Star Grant Robicheaux Accused of Rape

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

Grant Robicheaux appeared a few years ago on the Bravo reality TV series The Online Dating Rituals of the American Male. Now, he stands accused of drugging and raping women.

Robicheaux, a surgeon in Newport Beach, Calif., in 2014 appeared in a single episode of the show, during which he went on a date with a woman who told him, “I wanna know what’s wrong with you, because you seem, like, too perfect.” Afterward, she told the camera, “He seems a little too perfect. I think there might be some dark skeletons in that closet.”

Earlier this week, Robicheaux and his girlfriend Cerissa Laura Riley have been charged with raping women with the use of drugs. Investigators say they have discovered “hundreds of videos of apparently intoxicated women believed to have been filmed” by Robicheaux and Riley, according to The Mercury News. Both have denied the charges.

via Bravo Reality TV Star Grant Robicheaux Accused of Rape

#WhyIDidntReport Goes Viral In Response to Donald Trump Tweet

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

It is not at all shocking that a guy who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and has been accused of sexual assault by nearly two dozen women would embrace this line of thinking. And so, minutes later, #WhyIDidntReport was born. As of Friday afternoon, it’s the top trending hashtag on Twitter.

#WhyIDidntReport is not the first collective outpouring of sexual trauma on social media, nor will it be the last. A slew of people, including celebrities, opened up about their own experiences with abuse and the forces that kept them silent:

via #WhyIDidntReport Goes Viral In Response to Donald Trump Tweet

Cara Delevingne on why she didn’t report sexual abuse – BBC News

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

Model and actress Cara Delevingne has shared why she was so reluctant to report sexual abuse.
“I felt ashamed of what happened and didn’t want to publicly ruin someone’s life,” says Cara.
Thousands of women have been sharing their stories under the hashtag WhyIDidntReport.
It’s gained popularity after Donald Trump suggested people who’d been abused in the past should’ve gone to the authorities sooner.

via Cara Delevingne on why she didn’t report sexual abuse – BBC News

Distracted Boyfriend Meme Is Sexist in Sweden

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

Here in America we are tearing our hair out over having a very bad government much of which does not consider women fully human. But in Sweden, memes are being scrutinized for sexism.

The Guardian reported on Wednesday that Sweden’s advertising ombudsman ruled that the Distracted Boyfriend meme—which was once a quaint stock photograph by Antonio Guillem called Man Looking at Other Woman, and has been forever fused to our central nervous systems I am sure—is sexist. The image was used in ads for the internet services provider Bahnhof, which assigned the labels “You” to the boyfriend, “Your current workplace” to the girlfriend, and “Bahnhof” to the second woman.

via Distracted Boyfriend Meme Is Sexist in Sweden

Artist Sarah Lucas on Her New Museum Retrospective

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

Having only known her as the cool, confrontational artist in photos, I suspected Lucas, 55, would be tough in person. But when I meet her at the New Museum where she’s currently installing over 150 works for her first ever U.S. retrospective open September 26, Au Naturel, she is cool as a cucumber, albeit frazzled by the installation (she’s currently figuring out the best placement for a set of gigantic concrete boots in the museum’s lobby.) Just last week, she invited a group of women (and men in drag or dressed as giant phalluses) to the New Museum to help her create One Thousand Eggs: For Women, in which women throw precisely 1,000 eggs at a wall to create a gooey, yellow painting. “Women, we’ve got eggs, but they’re limited,” she tells me over lunch. “It’s a different thing to be a bloke… your seed isn’t limited. You can produce more and more of it, you can spill any amount of it around, if you’re just having a wank, and it doesn’t cut off.”

via Artist Sarah Lucas on Her New Museum Retrospective

Women Are Turning Their Facebook Profiles Black Today in Protest of Domestic Abuse Amidst a National Conversation About Blackouts and Sexual Violence

30th September 2018 ~ mcequality

Yesterday, a chain letter made its way through the Facebook DM’s in a coordinated effort to draw attention to domestic abuse. It reads:

Tomorrow [note: today, Sunday, September 30th] female blackout from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Its a movement to show what the world might be like without women. Your profile photo should just be a black square so that men wonder where the women are. Pass it only to women … It’s for a project against domestic abuse. It is no joke. Share it.

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The same effort has been made at least once before, but this blackout happens to dovetail with a conversation about the link between blackout drinking and violence toward women, prompted by allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Unsurprisingly, alcohol is also intrinsic to domestic violence; while estimates fluctuate widely, the general consensus is that perpetrators are believed to be intoxicated in well over half of domestic abusive cases in the US. In general, researchers estimate that about half of all sexual assaults in the US are committed by men who have been drinking.

via Women Are Turning Their Facebook Profiles Black Today in Protest of Domestic Abuse Amidst a National Conversation About Blackouts and Sexual Violence