Women to watch today: The millennials who don't want kids; the mums hit by family payments crackdown, and more - Women's Agenda

Women to watch today: The millennials who don’t want kids; the mums hit by family payments crackdown, and more

Short but very interesting article from the WSJ blogs about active and effective steps to get more women in STEM

The founder of Girls Who Code has taken the next step and started signing up companies to hire the women who have learned valuable technical skills.

Now we have girls in the pipeline that have been educated, that are coming from top schools. Are the tech companies going to hire them? This is a pledge from the top tech companies in the world that says yes,” said Ms. Saujani. “Given how bad the numbers are, if they hire just five of them, their tech teams are going to look dramatically different.


The Atlantic: How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously

Joe Fassler’s longish (~2500 words) article is a painful but amazing read. His wife was in excruciating pain, but hospital staff dismissed her description of it as exaggeration. This is not an uncommon thing for women.

The diagnosis of kidney stones—repeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physician’s prescribed course of treatment—was a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachel’s pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynaecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachel’s swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin. But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN. And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”

Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours. 


Interesting article on millennial women in America opting out of motherhood.

Millennial women don’t want it all. The Sheryl Sandberg model of balancing career and family has made a lot of sense for some mothers but may resonate less for younger women who simply don’t want to juggle ballet recitals with boardroom meetings. For most young women, working is not an option — it’s a necessity. Some data even shows that young women today focus on their career more than their male counterparts. That shift has had a significant impact on women’s family decisions; because young women today rank their career as more important than it has ever been for their demographic, having children has become an option instead of a prerequisite for a fulfilling adulthood. 


Deloitte University Press does a regular podcast called The Press Room, on issues and ideas that matter to business.

This podcast episode (link includes full transcript and link to detailed report) interview with Kathleen O’Dell is a fascinating take on the complex but incredibly strong link between poverty and gender inequality, and how providing basic access to electricity must be viewed through a gender lens.

Some of the key quotes in the interview:

– one of the leading predictors of the stability of a country is not its GDP or its resources of anything like that; it’s the way its women are treated.

– Any energy access program is ultimately looking to provide more productivity in a community, in a society, in a country. And so when you do that, if you do that without considering the gender lens then you’re missing out on potential opportunities for expanded economic productivity.

– girls that were in rural areas with access to electricity were about 60 percent more likely to complete their primary education than girls who didn’t [have electricity]. And we also looked at income levels of women in communities and those would increase by upwards of 100 percent or even up to 300 percent for those with access to electricity versus those that did not.


Short article about how the Turnbull government is starting the slow process of unwinding Abbott and Hockey’s ill-conceived 2014 budget and spending cuts. First on the negotiating table: Family Tax Benefit

The discussions included the option of stopping Family Tax Benefit Part B payments when a child turns 12, instead of the proposed plan, which was to cut the payments from when a child turned six.

The original proposal to ­restrict the benefits — which presently cut out when a child turns 16 — would have saved $1.9 billion over five years.

Proposals for two-year freezes on the rates of payments, and the thresholds at which they apply, could also be abandoned.

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