Feminist Reader: August 2015

Each month, the Rhodes Project publishes a selection of articles that approach issues of gender and feminism from informed, opinionated and novel angles.  Visit the Feminist Reader to find out about women’s responses to current challenges and catch up on gender-related news from around the world.

On the Rhodes Project Blog:

Daniel Wilner (Quebec & Brasenose 2007) released a short film about women and work-life balance, entitled "Working Mom".

From elsewhere:

New research from the Making Caring Common project at Harvard shows that gender stereotypes persist in adolescents' and teens' leadership preferences. The director and the partnerships manager at the project, Richard Weissbourd and Luba Falk Feigenberg respectively, further offered five ways for parents to prevent gender bias and raise girls to be leaders.

NPR's Rachel Martin talked to three women on Silicon Valley's deeply embedded diversity problem.

Kira Allman (Virginia & Magdalen College 2010) wrote about the way "advice-giving" on the way women speak can become an "inconspicuous vehicle of oppression".

In the Harvard Business Review, Joan C Williams' research reveals gendered and racial biases, rather than pipeline issues or personal issues, push women out of science.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote for TIME on the way whitewashed American beauty standards reject black female bodies and skew focus on female athletes to marketable images rather than athletic ability.

The Nation's Bryce Covert reflected on Betty MacMoran Gray's essay on whether feminism can ever be reconciled with capitalism.

Emma Barnett, Women's Editor of the Telegraph, gave a TEDx Talk on women's ambition and encouraging women to detect subtle factors that may, over time, eat away at goals.

Some universities started to distribute "consent kits" and consent contracts.

Helen Lewis discussed women in politics and the "motherhood trap", which exposes our economic dependency on unpaid carers' (often women's) labour.

Mother Jones' Hannah Levintova profiled Tracy Chou, the engineer who forced the Silicon Valley gender and diversity problem into the open.

Canadian photographer Annie Ling exhibited a portrait series on the "Independent Women of Iceland".

Ellen Pao resigned as Reddit's CEO--Beth Winegarner took a look at her legacy and how she survived the trolls.