#Equity and inclusion

[femmefatalevibe]

Hey, I've recently discovered a Youtube channel, The Financial Diet, and they have some really good material. I've mostly been listening to the stuff about how domestic chores aren't evenly distributed in marriage. Whether a woman chooses to be a career woman or a housewife, she's still getting the short end of the stick and will usually bare the majority of the weight for the household. I'd recommend this video in particular, Solving The Problem Of The Adult Toddler Husband. They bring up some really good points that have sat with me since I first watched it. For example, a group of very accomplished women left the house for 2 hours and WWIII broke out at home because their husbands couldn't manage. All the women had to abandon their plans and go tend to the house. Hearing stuff like this gives me pause. I'd really like to get married and be a mother, but it just seems like a bad business move, no matter the type of man a woman marries. I'm not the sacrificial type--I want to be a mother and a wife and still maintain my own identity. Just thought I'd share this here because I live in a region where I'm not allowed to bring up these issues lest I sound like a, feminist (*gasp*).

Hi love! Yes, I think The Financial Diet channel is great. Chelsea has some great, easy-to-understand tips regarding personal finance/money management, and I love her guest contributors/podcast guest episodes. Oh, this notion highlighted in this episode is SO true IRL. A 2008 study found that husbands add 7 hours of housework a week to their wives' plates, while wives decreased a husband's household chores by 1 hour per week.

Check out Melanie Hamlett on TikTok if you want to dive further into this topic. She labels the man in this dynamic under the patriarchy as "King Baby," and it gets me every time!

The Commercialization Of Intimate Life by Arlie Russell Hochschild is a wonderful read on this topic (and the most intersectional text I've found on the subject).

Glad to share more on this topic in the future if there's interest xx

[smua70]

http://ulbrichalmazan.blogspot.com/2024/01/solarpunk-creatures-and-equity-assurance.html

Today is the book birthday of the Solarpunk Creatures anthology by World Weaver Press. You can learn more about it here. The eBook is currently $4.99 and will be at that price until the end of January. Special credit should go out to the editors:

Christoph Rupprecht Mastodon: @focx@scholar.social Twitter: @focx

Deborah Cleland Bluesky: @patchworkdeb@bsky.social Mastodon: @debisda@aus.social

Melissa Ingaruca Moreno Instagram: mel_ingaruca

Norie Tamura Twitter: @tamura_norie

Rajat Chaudhuri Bluesky: @rajatchaudhuri@bsky.social Instagram: @rajatchaudhuri Twitter: @rajatchaudhuri

I have a short story in this anthology called "The Colorful Crow of Web-of-Life Park." The story is about the relationship between an escaped parrot and the crow that freed him, as the parrot is accepted as part of the crow's family. The parrot's former owner is a biologist who helps create and administer a bird flu vaccine. One of the people she speaks to during the story is an equity assurer, which is a new job I created for the solarpunk genre. Hopefully this is a concept that can be applied in real life.

My day job is in quality assurance. Specifically, I work for an enzyme company that produces food-grade enzymes, and I help implement our food safety system. Although enzymes are used in small amounts during food production, it's important that they not contain any pathogens, undeclared allergens, or foreign material that may harm the consumer. We follow a food safety code that is the basis of our policies and procedures. We keep many records to prove that that we are following our procedures, and we also have corrective and preventative actions we take when there is a problem. Every year, an outside auditor comes to our facility to review our system and make sure we meet the requirements of the code we follow. (This year, it will be an unannounced audit, meaning it can happen any time in a two-month period.) By passing this audit, my company obtains a certificate demonstrating to our customers that our product is safe. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it to prevent food-related illnesses.

I think we need a similar system to insure everyone has the resources they need to not just survive, but thrive. Income equality in the United States has grown dramatically in the past few decades while our social safety nets have been removed or made less helpful. This isn't good for the long-term survival of our society or our environment. We need to transition away from exploitative capitalism and toward doughnut economics. (Basically, we have to work within the boundaries of our resources to eliminate poverty while not exceeding the capacity of our environment.)

Equity assurance would have two major components: a collection of codes or guidelines communities (ranging from an apartment complex to towns or even nations) would follow for equitable resource distribution, and local equity assurers who are responsible for making sure that people get the resources they need. (I use "equity" instead of "equality" because everyone has different needs. Sometimes distributing resources equally doesn't help everyone equally. See here for a more complete discussion of this issue.) This could mean obtaining gluten-free food for someone with celiac disease; education, assistance, and baby supplies for a family with a newborn; or the right medicine or equipment to help sick, elderly, or disabled individuals. It can mean helping children get a good education and opportunities to develop their talents as well as people getting the right amount of social interaction.

These two branches of equity assurance aren't new. We have examples of people throughout history who have sought to help others meet their needs, and we have systems like Medicare and Social Security to give resources to those who need it. What I want to emphasize with a term like "equity assurance" is the need to make this care for others a core value of our society. When you adopt a food safety system at a company, it becomes the basis for everything you do. We need this for our society. We also need to maintain this system. Without people to monitor the day-to-day aspects of this system, things can go wrong. We need to make sure this system works and figure out ways to fix it when it doesn't.

Anyway, I plan to make equity assurance a theme in any more solarpunk stories I write. I did write another short story last year that featured equity assurance, but I haven't found a home for it yet. Establishing equity assurance for the world is certainly a long-term project, but one we need to pursue.

[stormofneurosis]

basically, the right to go "hey my body doesn't fit". Cis people do it all the time with plastic surgery or piercings or all of this stuff. And the ability to do… well… anything. Get married, adopt a kid, get protection from abuse, get job help, have a safe work environment. Some of these still aren't really there for cishets either, so the more we push, the better!

The whole thing reminds me of a tale I once read about someone's experience in the states of working in a legal brothel. If they were at home no one cared if they basically stood in their lawn in their underwear, but at the brothel if they went out to check the mail in short shorts and a crop top, the police could (and often would) be called on them for "unlawful advertisement of their services" - the double standard of performative Existing in a social space.

Queer rights may be about our right to be normal- to be normal couples, to live normal trans lives, to be normal people. But queer rights are also about our autonomy to be odd. We are QUEER, after all- weird, odd, not normal. And that is something that was originally imposed upon us, but we have taken it. It is ours now. Because lgbt rights are about our right to be normal, yes, but it is also about bodily autonomy! It is about our right to live our lives with odd genders and weird relationship structures and queer bodies. Assimilation might sound like a fine way to escape prejudice- but quite frankly, it doesn't matter. Because we are not just fighting for our rights to live like cishet people, we are also fighting for our right to live without having to worry about putting a toe out of line. We are queer, and we always will be. We won't really be free until we can live our lives as odd, as strange, as queer as we want.

[reasoningdaily]

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - Harvard's Claudine Gay cited 'racial animus' in her resignation letter

In Claudine Gay’s resignation letter on Tuesday, Harvard University’s first Black — and now former — president cited the fear of being “subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus” while battling allegations of plagiarism and her congressional hearing comments related to the Israel-Hamas war. But Gay and DEI — or diversity, equity and inclusion — experts point out that racial animus was not the only driving factor that led to her resignation.

“She was targeted partially due to her race, but as part of the larger, extremist, right-wing push to reverse social progress under this banner of anti-wokeness,” Lily Zheng, a DEI strategist and best-selling author of DEI Deconstructed, told Yahoo News.

Here’s what racial animus means and how it fuels the resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion in academic and corporate spaces.

What is racial animus?

Zheng defined racial animus, in plain terms, as “racial hostility.”

“She is talking about having a target on her back for being a Black woman, the first in Harvard's history. That's essentially what I am reading, when I see her words, ‘racial animus,’” Zheng said.

A day after stepping down, Gay penned an op-ed in the New York Times in which she said she was “called the N-word more times than I care to count,” in her short six months at Harvard.

“It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution,” Gay wrote.

Racial animus is fueling resistance to DEI

Civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton said on Tuesday that the resignation of Harvard’s first Black president (she’s also only the second woman to hold the position) was “an assault on the health, strength and future of diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Gay also shared her views on diversity, calling it a “source of institutional strength and dynamism,” and said she advocates for a “modern curriculum.”

But as the academic world and corporations moved to create or enhance DEI initiatives in the wake of the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, conservative leaders in the U.S. have attacked such initiatives as “tactics of liberal elites who suppress free thought in the name of identity politics and indoctrination.”

“Understanding our current racial landscape as a zero-sum game, where only one group of people can ‘win’ is at the heart of a lot of the current anti-wokeness, anti-DEI movement," said Zheng.

In her op-ed, Gay spoke of the conservative campaigns that “often trafficked in lies” to oust her and “often start with attacks on education and expertise.”

“They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament,” Gay wrote.

In an email to Yahoo News, Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who has taken credit for leading a conservative campaign to push Gay to resign, compared Gay’s “racism” to that of her critics.

“Evidence that Gay is racist: she oversaw a discriminatory admissions program ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court; led a discriminatory DEI bureaucracy that sought, among other things, to reduce the visual presence of ‘white men’ on campus; minimized antisemitism and the call for the violent ‘decolonization’ of Jews; supported policies that reduce individuals to racial categories and judge them on the basis of ancestry, rather than individual merit. Evidence that Claudine Gay's critics are racist: Claudine Gay claiming, but providing no hard evidence, that some unknown person or persons sent her mean emails,” Rufo wrote.

“It is a shame that some people appear to be using the tragedy playing out in the Middle East to further their agenda around attacking what they see as a too-liberal institution of higher education,” Sarah Soule, a professor who teaches organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told Yahoo News. “If such attacks on higher education hadn't been playing out in other places in recent years, such as in Hungary, it might seem surprising. But it is just plain terrifying.”

‘Extremely strong desire’ for social progress

Zheng says that DEI efforts have historically been about “eliminating discrimination, creating fairness” and building organizations and universities that work for everyone.

“There are articles from Harvard themselves essentially admitting to, in the past and in the present, the social networks of these kinds of prestigious universities have been typically rich white men, building social, political and financial connections with other rich white men that weaves the fabric of America's political and corporate landscape for decades to come.”

Zheng added that this model of Ivy League institutions needs to change.

While Gay’s resignation, political efforts to ban DEI initiatives and the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action have been “disheartening,” according to Zheng, the decisions have not deterred people’s attitudes toward social progress. Zheng said DEI continues to be an “extremely strong desire” for working Americans and students pursuing higher education.

“There’s value for DEI for institutions at Harvard, institutions that have in the past, and in the present, continue to be bastions of this ‘old boys club,’ this kind of informal network that is fundamentally anti-meritocratic, and is about people from one set of social groups helping others from the same social group,” Zheng affirmed.

“We need to build institutions that actually work for everyone, that support everyone, that give everyone a fair shot for success that open up the doors of opportunity for everyone.”

[harmeet-saggi]

Fostering Well-Being: The Impact Of Workplace Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion On Mental Health

In the contemporary corporate landscape, the buzzwords of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have taken center stage. However, beyond the boardroom discussions and policy changes lies a profound impact on an often-overlooked aspect of our lives: mental health. This essay delves into the intricate relationship between workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion and mental well-being. We will explore the multifaceted benefits of fostering an inclusive environment, the importance of employee training, and practical steps organizations can take to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace, all in the context of enhancing mental health.

Know more

[happinessasasecondlanguage]

Privilege Explained Through Baseball - and It's So Easy to Understand...

It is amazing how much conversation is generated by the concept of privilege – both from those who want to know more about it (thank you!) and those who vehemently deny that they have ever had a modicum of it in their lives.  My favorite example of the latter was the 26-year-old CFO of a $240 million company who demanded that I acknowledge that he worked for everything he has and has never been…

[global-insights]

[femmefatalevibe]

Is this blog LGBTQ+ friendly? I'm a nonbinary femme lesbian, so I want to be sure that myself and people like me are welcome. I'm sure you're chill, just better safe than sorry, you feel?

Hi love. Absolutely! Sending you a very warm welcome to this community. As a general PSA, I desire to create a supportive, educational, and inclusive space for all women, anti-patriarchal men, non-binary folks, girls, gays, and theys, etc. No bigotry is tolerated here.

I understand they're certain nuances and lived experiences that members of the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities, as a straight white woman I've never encountered first-hand or even thought to consider before, so I try my best to share these questions and thoughts from these individuals with our diverse community to ensure they can get some more first-hand feedback from those who have more knowledge and insights about these relationships/struggles/dilemmas/life hacks.

Hope this clarifies a few things. Sending love xx

[reportwire]

MacDowell artist retreat org taps Chiwoniso Kaitano to lead

NEW YORK — MacDowell, one of the oldest artist residency programs in the U.S., has tapped Chiwoniso Kaitano as its new executive director, the organization announced Friday. Kaitano joins MacDowell with a mandate to “intensify outreach to traditionally underrepresented artistic voices,” among other charges, a release said. “Our search was rigorous, all our finalists compelling. But Chi’s…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ryan Adamczeski at The Advocate:

Donald Trump claims he has "nothing to do" with Project 2025, but he has a playbook of his own that would be devastating for LGBTQ+ Americans and other marginalized communities. The former president's reelection website features a section entitled Agenda 47, which hosts dozens of videos of Trump outlining his policies for if he returns to office. Several policies threaten the LGBTQ+ community, spanning across education, health care, and the military. In one video titled "President Trump's Plan to Protect Children From Left-Wing Gender Insanity," Trump promised to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors at the federal level, and “cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” He also promised to ban transgender athletes from competing on teams that match their gender identity.

Trump stated that he "will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female — and they are assigned at birth.” He then claimed that being transgender was "invented" by the "radical left," though he did not use the term "transgender" once throughout Agenda 47. “No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender — a concept that was never heard of in all of human history — nobody’s ever heard of this, what’s happening today," Trump rambled. "It was all when the radical left invented it just a few years ago.”

[...] As for public education, Trump vowed to "cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children." He also promised to "create a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values."

While Donald Trump may claim to have “nothing to do” with Project 2025, it and Agenda 47 are practically like-for-like in many key policy areas. #Agenda47 #Project2025

[jcmarchi]

How examining conflict can be “intellectually serious” and “incredibly fun”

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/how-examining-conflict-can-be-intellectually-serious-and-incredibly-fun/

How examining conflict can be “intellectually serious” and “incredibly fun”

The banging on the tables begins almost immediately.

It’s September, and the 53 first-year students in MIT’s Concourse program are debating the pros and cons of capitalism during one of their Friday lunchtime seminars in Building 16. Sasha Rickard ’19 — assistant director of Concourse and the chair, or moderator, of the debate — reminds everyone of the rules: “Stand when you speak, address your questions and comments to the chair, and if you hear someone saying something you support, give them a little bang on the table.” The first speaker walks to the podium, praises the benefits of capitalism for her allotted four minutes, and is rewarded with a cacophony of table-banging.

Other students jump up to question her argument. The next speaker takes the opposite view, denouncing capitalism. For nearly two hours, there are more speeches on both sides of the issue, more questions, more enthusiastic banging on tables. Participants call the back-and-forth “intellectually serious,” “genuine good-faith engagement,” and “incredibly fun.”

The debate is one of the cornerstones of MIT’s Civil Discourse Project, a joint venture between the Concourse program and philosophy professors Brad Skow and Alex Byrne. The premise behind the Civil Discourse Project is that first-year students who practice talking and listening to each other even when they disagree will become more thoughtful and open-minded citizens, during their time at MIT and beyond.

“It’s consistent with free expression and free speech, but also consistent with the mission of the university, which is teaching and learning and getting to a greater sense of the truth,” says Linda Rabieh, a senior lecturer in the Concourse program and co-leader of the Civil Discourse Project with Skow, Byrne, and Concourse Director Anne McCants.

The project appears to be working. First-year Ace Chun, one of the student debaters, says,“It’s easy to just say, ‘Well, you have your opinion and I have mine,’ or ‘You’re wrong and I’m right.’ But going through the process of disagreement and coming up with a more informed position feels really important.”

It’s debatable

Funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the project launched in fall 2023 as a series of paired events. First, two scholars with opposing views on a particular subject — often one from MIT and one from another institution — participate in a formal debate on campus. A week or two later, the Concourse students, having seen the first debate, hold their own version on the same topic. Past debates have explored feminism, climate change, Covid-19 public-health policies, and the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza.

This year’s first scholar debate explored the question “Is capitalism defensible?” and featured economist Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who argued in the affirmative, and political scientist Alex Gourevitch of Brown University, who vigorously disagreed. Roughly 350 people registered to watch the two take turns delivering prepared remarks and answering audience questions in a large auditorium in the Stata Center.

These debates are open to everyone at MIT, as well as the public. They are not recorded or livestreamed because, Skow says, “we want people to feel free to say whatever’s on their mind without worrying that it’s going to be on the internet forever.” Concourse students in attendance look for ideas for what they might say in their own debate, but also, Rabieh says, how they might say it. Cowen and Gourevitch remained respectful even when their exchanges grew louder and hotter, and they ended the evening with a handshake. Students “were seeing reasonable people disagree,” Rabieh says.

Five or six years ago, Rabieh had begun to notice a reluctance among students to talk about controversial ideas; they didn’t want to risk offending anyone. “Most MIT students spend a lot of their time doing math, science, or engineering, and it’s tempting for them to take refuge in the certainty of quantitative reasoning,” she says.

Today’s combative political and cultural landscape can make it even harder to get students talking about hot-button issues, and as a result, civil discourse has become something of a holy grail in higher education. Some institutions (including MIT) now incorporate free-speech exercises into their orientation programs; others host “conversation” events or offer special faculty training. Byrne sees MIT’s Civil Discourse Project, with its connection to the Concourse curriculum, as consistent, pragmatic, hands-on learning. “We’re talking instead of just talking about talking,” he says. “It’s like swimming. It’s all very well to hear a lecture about pool etiquette — stay in your lane, don’t dive-bomb your fellow swimmers — but at some point, you have to actually get in the pool.”

Learning to argue

Concourse’s “pool” can be found in a student lounge in Building 16. That’s where a group of “debate fellows” — older students who have gone through the Concourse program themselves — coach the first-year students in crafting statements and speeches that can be presented at a debate. It’s also where the fellows help Rabieh and Rickard adapt the original debate question into a resolution the younger students can reasonably argue about. “Our students are still figuring out what they think about a lot of things,” Rickard says. So, the question debated by Cowen and Gourevitch — Is capitalism defensible? — becomes: “Capitalism is the best economic system because it prioritizes freedom and material wealth.”

The first-year students jumped in. During their lunchtime debate, they crowded around tables, ate lasagna and salad, and waited their turn at the podium. They told personal stories to illustrate their points. They tried arguing in support of an idea that they actually disagreed with. They admitted when they were stumped. “That’s a tricky question,” one of the speakers conceded.

“At a place like MIT, it’s easy to get caught up in your own world, like ‘I have this big assignment or I have this paper due,’” says debate fellow and senior Isaac Lock. “With the Civil Discourse Project, students are thinking about big ideas, maybe not having super-strong, solid opinions, but they’re at least considering them in ways that they probably haven’t done before.”

They’re also learning what a balanced conversation feels like. The student debates use a format developed by Braver Angels, a national organization that holds workshops and debates to try to bridge the partisan divide that exists in the United States today. With strict time limits and room for both prepared speeches and spontaneous remarks, the format “allows different types of people to speak,” says debate fellow Arianna Doss, a sophomore. “Because of the debates, we’re better-equipped to articulate our points and provide nuance — why I believe what I believe — while also acknowledging and understanding the shortcomings of our arguments.”

The Civil Discourse Project will publish more about its spring semester lectures on its website. Coleman Hughes, author of “The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,” will be on campus March 3, and a debate on the relevance of legacy media is being planned for later in the semester.

[iwouldkickahorse]

hey gang, in the event of project 2025 coming about, make sure to archive media that will literally be illegal if it were to happen.

ARCHIVE

ARCHIVE

ARCHIVE

Please for the love of god archive

Now WHY should you archive? Well…

according to page 36-37 of project 2025 it states the following

To quote, “P*rnography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered”

ok…well what constitutes as p*rn? The answer is

THEY DONT GIVE ONE

so please archive media

[happinessasasecondlanguage]

The U.S. National Parks Welcome You! Unless You're a Girl...

I was in Zion National Park this past weekend, and noticed something so heartbreaking and infuriating, and such a slap in the face of inclusion, that I cannot believe our national parks would allow it. My friend and I were staying in the Zion Lodge, the only hotel inside the park, which is run by a private corporation and has a gift shop onsite. In the store was a spinning rack with wood-paneled…

[codewithcode]

Debt limit talks start, stop as Republicans, White House face 'serious differences'

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — Debt limit talks between the White House and House Republicans stopped, started and stopped again Friday at the U.S. Capitol, a dizzying series of events in high-stakes negotiations to avoid a potentially catastrophic federal default. President Joe Biden’s administration is reaching for a deal with Republicans led by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as the nation faces…