Atheist women’s numbers matter. Be counted in the Atheist Census Online.
Hey, are you a woman? Are you also an Atheist, Freethinker, Humanist, Rationalist, Secularist, Agnostic, Non-religious and/or Otherwise-identifying non-believer?
If so, have you already added your relevant details (just a few simple demographic datapoints) to the Atheist Census Online? Because if you haven’t, I’m about to attempt to persuade you to do so, even though it is just another unscientific internet poll.
Yet another women and purchasing power list o’ facts (and omissions)
Yet, yet again, it makes no distinction between
*discretionary personal spending which a woman can choose not to do and nobody except herself will care
versus
*necessary household spending, which if the woman doesn’t do then somebody else has to get it done.
FBI updates its definition of rape
This will have a knock-on effect regarding discussions of rape online…
Feminists are not your enemy
As an economist and a feminist I can’t tell you irritating I find articles like this one from Lucy Kippist in The Punch, “Screw equal pay; what do women really want?” Academics and feminists who continue to prioritise the closing the gender-oriented wage gap disregard the huge list of unmanageable priorities that come with a [...]
Sobering thought for the day: how many earn $250K?
US$250,000 is an important number because this the income level where the about-to-expire Bush tax cuts (that have got the Tea Party so energised) kick in, and these are the tax cuts that many people say are motivating their intent to vote Republican at the mid-term elections that will be held today.
Quicklink: OKCupid’s ‘statistical distinctness’ analysis
“We selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. We then took all these people’s profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group’s essays statistically distinct from the others’.”
That Homebirth Study in South Australia
Planned home and hospital births in South Australia, 1991-2006: differences in outcomes Robyn Kennare, Marc Keirse, Graeme Tucker and Annabelle Chan, MJA 192(2), 18 January 2009 You’re going to be hearing a lot from the Australian Medical Association about That Homebirth Study In South Australia, so here are a few actual facts to be getting [...]
Girls Gone Wild or Wild Women? or: We Never Had Nasty Sluts When I Were A Lad
Reading an article about women’s violence at Schoolies’s Week recently prompted me to pull this languishing post out of my Drafts folder. This snippet exemplifies the phenomenon of low levels of criminal or “disorderly” behaviour by young women being given greater weight than the same behaviour from young men – though the men are being [...]
Canadian study finds mothers & babies much less likely to be injured in homebirth
Via Science and Sensibility, this new homebirth study out of British Columbia should be required reading for our Health Department and policy-makers: “Outcomes of planned home birth with registered midwife versus planned hospital birth with midwife or physician”[1]. This high-quality study compared equivalent-risk homebirths (HB), midwife-attended hospital births (Midwife-in-Hospital, MiH), and doctor-attended hospital births (Doctor-in-Hospital, [...]
Inaccurate contraceptive info from National Prescribing Service
One of the key pieces of information we need when choosing contraception is accurate data on effectiveness. What is the likelihood that your birth control will stop you getting pregnant? We are presented with pretty charts by family planning counsellors, doctors, midwives; sometimes we are told a little more about “real world” and “perfect use” [...]
Violence by Numbers
People who followed White Ribbon Day a few months ago will remember that WRD was bitterly resented by (a) many members of the public who saw it in impossibly crude terms – but, but, but, you mean men are all mean, nasty people!? and (b) the usual suspects, the MRAs, some of whom actually have [...]
Feminism and birth in Australia: moving from stat-wrangling towards a reproductive choice perspective
I’ve been looking for the most recent official stats on homebirth and hospital birth mortality in Australia. I can’t find 2007 or 2008 figures, but there are 2006 figures available. Australia’s mothers and babies 2006 The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Perinatal Statistics Unit, Published December 2008. Most births in Australia occur in hospitals, [...]
More confected fat-baby epidemic panic? The “increasing trend” that isn’t.
This supposed ongoing upward trend in birthweight has been used as an excuse for absurd levels of inductions of labour and skyrocketing C sections, and a springboard for blaming lazy, old, fat, neglectful mothers for the “obesity epidemic”, childhood cancer, asthma, diabetes, cats and dogs living together – you name it, someone screams “Inflating babies!”, [...]

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