Feminism in News and Popular Media

[Happy_Go_Lucky]

"Kicked and Recommended"

That means the person kicking and recommending wants the op to stay front and center due to what they believe is important and germane. Hence, I want to keep the thread alive.

[Kobi]

By the end of this week, half of the nation’s state legislatures will be back to work for the year, but don’t expect to see a lot of women on the floor of state legislatures.

There are exactly 5,600 male lawmakers, compared to 1,783 female lawmakers, according to a new count from the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. That means that just under one in four state legislators is a woman. And there hasn’t been much progress in gender parity over the past year — the ratio today is the exact same as it was five years ago. Arkansas saw the most growth since 2009, with women now accounting for 23.7 percent of state lawmakers, up from 17 percent. Alaska saw the biggest decline. There, women now make up 20 percent of the legislature, down from 28.3 percent in 2009.

Just four states can claim to have more than one in three female lawmakers: Vermont (41 percent), Colorado (41 percent), Arizona (36 percent) and Minnesota (34 percent). In the four states with the lowest share of female legislators, women make up less than 15 percent of the legislature. Their share is smallest — about 12 percent in Louisiana. Next is South Carolina, followed by Oklahoma and then Alabama.

Women make up nearly one in every three state Democrats, compared to about one in six Republicans. Among female state lawmakers, 1,134 are Democrats while 634 are Republicans.

There are also few women in leadership. In only nine states does a woman serve as the Senate president or president pro tem, according to NCSL. Six states have a female House speaker. Overall, there are just 62 women in major positions in the states.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...in-five-years/

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

Do not bother to call. She’s planning to celebrate in Botswana. “I thought: ‘What do I really want to do on my birthday?’ First, get out of Dodge. Second, ride elephants.”

Gloria

[Kobi]

Wed. May 14th
5:00 PM Pacific / 8:00 PM Eastern
Participate LIVE and have full access to download the
webinar at any time.

Something big is happening for us as women. We’re on the brink of an evolutionary shift with the potential to alter the course of history. Millions of us around the world are feeling a calling to reclaim the feminine, and in so doing, to awaken our authentic power to co-create the future of our lives and shape the future of our world.

You may be experiencing it as an impulse to evolve yourself, to realize the potential of your creative gifts and talents and to make your greatest contribution. You may yearn for deeper experiences of love, intimacy and connection and feel a longing to come more fully alive. You may even intuitively sense that you have a unique purpose and a critical role to play in shaping the future of our world. And you may well be right.

Never before have we, as women, been holding so much power to shape the future.

For the first time in history, women outnumber men as graduates from American colleges. Over 40% of women in the US are also the primary breadwinners in their households, and as of January this year women outnumber men in the work force. In October 2012, CNN declared that women would become the “saviors of the global economy” and the Dalai Lama prophesized that “the world will be saved by the Western woman.”

Paradoxically, studies show that we’ve never been more unhappy.

Yet, despite the amazing success and privilege we’ve gained over the past 50 years, numerous studies continue to reveal a startling truth: that women’s overall sense of happiness and well-being has actually been on a significant and steady decline since the early 1970s.

For all the amazing benefits that feminism has brought us, its fruits have not necessarily included personal or spiritual fulfillment. If you’re feeling subtle, yet persistent anxiety or depression in spite of the possibilities for greatness you can sense, you’re not alone.

In fact, the majority of women today experience a profound and painful gap between the highest potentials we intuit for our lives and the way that our lives actually show up on a day to day basis.

We sense the possibility for so much more….

While we’ve gained the freedom to do, be and have anything we want, we haven’t necessarily cultivated the power to cause our lives to flourish and thrive.

Rather than having arrived in the land of milk and honey, as we’d hoped we would, we now find ourselves wrestling with a new kind of discontent—a new “problem that has no name.”

We’ve been cultivating a masculine version of power.

By wholeheartedly embracing a masculine version of power (that was so necessary to level the playing field 50 years ago), we’ve dramatically elevated our standard of living, while at the same time, severely diminishing our quality of life.

We now have more freedom, money, education and opportunity than any other generation of women in history. Yet we often feel powerless to create those things we most value and care about: love, intimacy, connection, belonging, creativity, self-expression, aliveness, meaning, purpose, contribution and a brighter future for generations to come.

We think our struggle to create these things we long for is a personal failure—but it’s actually a collective problem, symptomatic of our larger evolutionary journey as women. The restlessness we’re feeling is actually a critical calling, an impulse to evolve.

Awakening a new, co-creative feminine power holds the key to our personal and planetary potential.

The good news is that there is a vibrant, life-enriching alternative to masculine power that is fully within reach for every awakening woman. We call it “feminine power”–and it has the power to transform your life from the inside out.

Unlike masculine power, which is the power to create things that can be controlled, feminine power is the power to manifest that which is beyond our control, including those things that our heart most yearns for–intimacy, relatedness, creative expression, authentic community and meaningful contribution.

Through our pioneering research and intensive work with thousands of women from around the world, we’ve identified the specific principles, processes and practices by which women can awaken this new, co-creative feminine power in their lives.

We’ve discovered that there are three very distinct sources of feminine co-creativity that give access to three different kinds of power: the power to change your life, the power to realize your destiny and the power to transform the world. We call them “the three power bases of the co-creative feminine.”



The Keys to Awakening Power Base #1:
THE POWER TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Why most popular approaches to transforming core beliefs don’t work for women, and the brand new, leading edge process that really does
Liberate yourself and others from the tyranny of old disempowering patterns, graduating forever from the dynamics of the past
How to have a generative, empowered relationship with your feelings and emotions, and why you absolutely must know how to do this in order to realize your greater potentials

The Keys to Awakening Power Base #2:
THE POWER TO REALIZE YOUR DESTINY

Experience the joy of being radically alive and dynamically engaged in the co-creative process of life
Master the ability to discern your inner guidance such that you begin navigating life from an assured sense that you are on your “destiny path”
Learn how to access the unlimited support and resources of All of Creation to cause the full flourishing of life everywhere you go

The Keys to Awakening Power Base #3:
THE POWER TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD

Learn why we cannot be become ourselves by ourselves, and how to create evolutionary partnerships that will unleash the full realization of your unique gifts and contributions
How to harness the power of the collective field to cause unprecedented transformations in our lives and in our world
How to become a powerful agent of change and consciously join with others to co-create the future of our world

We can’t wait to be with you for this Global Online Webinar &
Gathering on Wednesday, May 14th!

http://femininepower.com/online-cour...-class/fbpost/

[Kobi]

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — In the male-dominated world of horse racing, Anna Rose Napravnik (nah-PRAHV'-nik) figured she'd have better luck if nobody noticed a woman's name in the track program.

She started out her career disguising her gender, riding under the initials A.R. Napravnik.

Nine years later, Rosie Napravnik is one of the rising stars in the sport, having long ago discarded her ruse. Now the 26-year-old from New Jersey will try to make even bigger history and become the first woman to ride a Kentucky Derby winner.

She's achieved firsts before. She was the first woman to win the Louisiana Derby, and did it twice. She also was the highest-placing female rider in the Kentucky Derby.

http://news.yahoo.com/rosie-napravni...1757--spt.html

[Kobi]

POKHARA, Nepal (AP) — When Lucky, Dicky and Nicky Chettri tried to break into Nepal's male-dominated trekking industry 20 years ago, competitors tried to run them out of business. They say men threatened them, harassed them — even filed bogus police reports against them.

"The men said this is a business for the men and we should leave it alone," said Lucky, the eldest Chettri sister in the 3 Sisters Adventure Trekking Company. "They would even accuse us of trying to take away food from their table."

Now the sisters have a booming business and a waiting list of Nepalese women who want to join their six-month training program for mountain guides.

The rise of the Chettri sisters' business in many ways reflects the increasing clout of women in Nepal, which remains in most ways a deeply patriarchal country.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first climbed Mount Everest in 1953, but it was another 40 years before the first Nepali woman reached the peak. Since then, women have made progress in politics, education and business.

About 5 percent of Nepali politicians were female in 1990, but women won a third of the seats in the 2008 parliamentary election. Some discriminatory laws have been changed, including one that allowed only sons to inherit parental property.

Shailee Basnet, who led a 10-member Nepali women's team to Everest in 2008, said the number of women in trekking and mountaineering has risen as well, and she gave credit to the Chettri sisters.

"They have started a trend for women to take up this profession. Women guiding foreign trekkers in the region has become a normal thing now," she said.

The Chettris came up with the idea of opening a woman-run trekking agency when they heard from foreign female travelers who were harassed, even sexually assaulted and threatened by their own male guides while trekking remote mountain trails.

"These girls were really afraid and felt insecure," said Lucky, 48, at their office next to the picturesque Phewa lake.

The sisters once led trips themselves, but had trouble finding more women who knew trekking, spoke English and were willing to spend days walking with the foreigners away from home. Their solution was to bring the women to Pokhara and train them for months.

"At the beginning it was very unusual for the women to join our program because they had to leave their homes for many days, working with Westerners," said Nicky, the youngest of the sisters. "Some thought it was against our culture because women are expected to be at home doing household work."

But soon the word spread. "These women began to like the idea that they don't need to depend on their husbands for money," Nicky said.

Gam Maya Tilicha, 25, once planned to become a teacher but is now a full-time guide at the agency.

"I never imagined that I would be a trekking guide. But the income is very good and I like what I am doing — meeting people from all over the world and traveling to new places in Nepal," she said.

The sisters take in 40 students every six months, giving them free housing, food and clothing. The money earned from the trekking agency supports the training.

Once they graduate, they make about $3,000 a year from guiding tourists, a better-than-average salary in this poor Himalayan nation. Monika Rai, a 19-year-old student, hopes it leads to something better.

"I am here to learn the skills of trekking and English language so that I can become a guide and make more money than in any other jobs," she said.

The Chettris have 150 women guides who lead close to 1,000 foreign trekkers a year. They cater to those who travel the lower mountain trails, not the mountaineers who go beyond Everest's base camp and up to the world's tallest peak.

Mountaineering and trekking is a big business in Nepal, where half the foreign visitors come to explore the mountains. According to the Nepal Mountaineering Association, some 340,000 foreign tourists ventured on treks last year.

Many of the visitors are single women who prefer to have female companion, including Sophie Whitwell, a 25-year-old marketing executive from London who signed up with 3 Sisters.

"I would definitely want a female guide. I am sure it would be fine if you went with a male guide but you just don't know, and you are walking with them potentially alone for several hours a day," she said. "If you are in a scenario where you need a rescue ... a female guide is just as capable of walking to the next town to get help or make a phone call."

http://news.yahoo.com/women-reach-to...105449701.html