Progress is not equality

Dear Editor,

Earlier this month, Senator Rand Paul informed The National Review Online, "There are people now who hesitate to tell a joke to a woman in the workplace, any kind of joke, because it could be interpreted incorrectly." The senator evoked a stereotype that has been around as long as the movement towards gender equity: women just can't take a joke anymore.

This semester, Life on the Lane has attempted to make many jokes that have to do with women. As a few quick examples, the publication has used the term "bitch" in conjunction with a female Dean, called members of sororities whores, and most recently attacked Drury's V Warriors. Through the annual production of The Vagina Monologues, the V Warriors raise several thousand dollars each year for Harmony House, a center that provides shelter to survivors of domestic violence and education to the Springfield community. These courageous young women devote hours and hours each year to producing the Monologues, and the productions are often sold out to supportive and enthusiastic crowds. Life on the Lane also singled out one particular member of the group, who has since graduated from Drury. Had writers for Life on the Lane attended the show last year, they would have had the pleasure of hearing her particular monologue. While many of the monologues are very funny and celebratory, shows often contain one or two monologues that are more somber. The individual who Life on the Lane attacks read a monologue based on the gang rapes of women during the Bosnian war, rapes that were often perpetrated with guns as the instruments of violation. Such mass rapes are a common weapon in wars throughout history, and continue today.

But to be clear, sexual violence is not a distant abstract horror. In the U.S. alone an estimated 1.5 million women are assaulted each year by a husband or boyfriend, and between 1 out of 4 and 1 out 6 women are the victim of an attempted rape or completed rape. If you are reading this in a public place, it might behoove you to look around the room and do some math. Think about it for a minute. You might also talk with your women friends about what it's like to live according to what is sometimes called a "rape schedule": an unconscious but continual effort to avoid being raped (always carrying one's car keys pointing outward; always watching friends' drinks at bars to make sure they have not been drugged; always using a buddy system, etc.). It's exhausting, and sometimes even when one strictly adheres to the "rape schedule" one is still raped. In light of recent developments at Penn State, it's also worth mentioning that while 9 out of every 10 victims of rape are female, an estimated 1 in 33 men in the U.S. are the victims of an attempted or completed rape.

I am clearly talking about the worst and most obvious displays of gender inequity here, and, you may be thinking, "Well yes, that's terrible, but otherwise, gender inequality is a thing of the past." You would not be alone in thinking this. Because of the tremendous progress towards gender equity over the past forty years, many believe the work is done. Time Magazine reports in one 2009 poll that 60% of men and 50% of women "are convinced that there are no longer any barriers to women's advancement in the workplace." Yet while women make up at least half of the students at colleges today, women continue to make 75 cents to every dollar men make once they leave college. The fact that an equal number of women and men now attend college does not translate into equal treatment of men and women within or after college. We're just not there yet.

Vision2020, a recently formed national initiative that aims to achieve real equality between women and men by 2020, gives a sense of where women are, right now, in the nation. Here are some excerpts from Vision2020's snapshot of the status of women, across a wide range of areas, today in the U.S. To learn more, you can visit http://www.drexel.edu/vision2020/equality/today, where you can access links that take you directly to the reports that provide the data below.

Business:Only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.

Law:While women now make up nearly 1 out of every 2 associates in law firms, they account for only 1 out of every 6 equity partners. Only 26% of state court judges in the U.S. are women.

Media:Women hold 3% of clout positions in the mainstream media.

Science:The number of U.S. women receiving PhDs in most areas in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics did not increase over the 10-year period between 1997-2006.

Art:Between 2004 and 2007, the percentage of art by women artists on view at any one time was no more than 15% at the Whitney Museum and no more than 8% at the Museum of Modern Art.