Canada and the World Backgrounder articles from January 1995

Canada and the World Backgrounder archives from January 1995

"You've come a long way baby" - not.(women have not come that far in terms of equality)
January 1, 1995... In the 1970s, a brand of cigarettes used the slogan in our headline to push its product. There was a wholesome young woman puffing away on her Virginia Slim having achieved, according to the implication in the headline, if not complete equality...

A battle not yet won.(women's rights past and present)(Cover Story)
January 1, 1995... In 1992, the Environics polling people asked women if they were feminists; only a third of them said Yes. However, the same poll found that four out of five Canadians - women and men - thought that the women's movement had been good for women but...

The maleness of politics.(women in politics and the masculine nature of politics)
January 1, 1995... The caregiver and homemaker roles tend to produce a self-image that is secondary and supportive and which sits uneasily alongside the assertive and opinionated political persona. It's argued that girls are still socialized to care more about...

Backlash.(men's reaction to feminist movement)
January 1, 1995... For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, we get the backlash against feminism, much of it detailed in Susan Faludi's book Backlash. Many men feel threatened by the new assertiveness of women. They fear losing the privilege...

Consciousness raising.(sexist remarks by Canadian politicians)
January 1, 1995... Many men, even those who should know better, still don't get it; they still make insensitive and sexist remarks. New Democrat MPP Drummond White was chairing a committee in Ontario's Queen's Park in 1992. The committee was listening to a feminist...

The twenty-first century belongs to women.(forecasts of women's equality)
January 1, 1995... The United STates will have a woman president by the year 2008; women will soon break through the "glass ceiling" and become the new corporate leaders; in 1998 women will run the marathon as fast or faster than men. These are fearless predictions...

On being a boy toy.(how women are pressured to improve their physical appearance)
January 1, 1995... An Ontario woman wrote that her 12-year-old niece, who was neither fat nor thin, had been dieting since she was nine years old. She and her Grade 8 friends worried about their weight, their hair, their clothes, their shoes. But, mostly, their...

Heroines for the nineties.(changes in how women are portrayed on television)
January 1, 1995... Has reality come to television networkland? Two of the most successful TV shows in the fall 1994 schedule are about ordinary women. The stars of of Grace Under Fire, and Ellen are well over 30 and closing in on 40. They are single moms with...

Top cops.(women not getting top jobs in police force)
January 1, 1995... Women are not making it into top-level police jobs according to a federal report, partly because of promotion systems based on seniority. The 1993 report recommends that forces emphasize other things, such as written exams, when making...

Flying high.(women pilots)
January 1, 1995... The Times of London news service reported these fascinating flyer facts: * In June 1994, a 12-year-old Pennsylvania girl pilotted a single-engine plane across the Atlantic. Vicki Van Meter held the record for being the youngest female pilot to...

More than cheerleaders.(how women athletes overcome discrimination)
January 1, 1995... Having the right to play ball still can be a struggle for women. In 1992, two teenage girls - Erin Casselman, 15, and Suzanne Ouellet, 16 - were barred from the Ontario soccer championships after their team advanced to the quarter-finals simply...

Reach for the top.(woman mountain climber Arlene Blum)
January 1, 1995... Mountaineer Arlene Blum was rejected once by a male leader of a 1969 climbing expedition in Afghanistan who said: "One woman and nine men would seem to me to be unpleasant, high on the open ice, not only in excretory situations, but in the...

In the pocket.(female billiards player Loree Jon Jones)
January 1, 1995... By 1991, Loree Jon Jones had become the world's second-ranked female billiards player after working at the game for 25 years. Despite, or perhaps because of her skill, she says some men still come up to her and say, "How can you be in this sport?...

Joining the old boys' club.(discrimination against women in employment)
January 1, 1995... During her flight-surgeon training in the late 1960s, Wendy Clay was advised that she would "have to work extra hard to make up for the handicap of being a female." But, she says she never saw her career as different from a man's. In 1994, Ms....

It's the law.(law against discrimination in employment)
January 1, 1995... The Federal Employment Equity Act became law in 1986 and covers both Crown corporations and federally regulated firms, such as banks, communications, and transportation was designed to reduce discrimination against women, visible minorities,...

A long and winding road.(union women workers make more compared to men than their non-union counterparts)
January 1, 1995... While there has been progress,family leave and pay-equity policies still are seen as innovative. Even Canadian unions and their U.S. counterparts have a long way to go in promoting women to executive positions. That's the opinion of the...

Political women.(women are still underrepresented in Canadian politics)
January 1, 1995... As the first head of a national party, NDP leader Audrey McLaughlin rejects the traditional "macho" confrontational style of politics. Instead, she favours consensus and accommodation and has stressed affirmative-action programs to promote the...

Equal fees; unequal privilege.(woman sues country club for discriminating against women)
January 1, 1995... It was a struggle, but in April 1994, Beach Grove Golf and Country Club in Windsor, Ontario reached a settlement with Tamra Jean Tobin-Teno. Mrs. Tobin-Teno is a lawyer who for years complained that the golf club gave the best playing time to its...

A for Alberta.(Alberta has highest percentage of women in management jobs in Canada)
January 1, 1995... Data from 16 Canadian medical schools indicates that 52.2% of those accepted as students in 1993/94 were women.

In the name of the mother.(how women are excluded in religion)
January 1, 1995... Religious belief is a human attempt to understand the cosmos and find our place within it. Religious ideas change over time, reacting to and influencing human experience. When they take hold, they tend to reflect the concerns of the ruling elite,...

Vive la difference.(physical and psychological differences between males and females)
January 1, 1995... All embryos start off more female than male, and they all begin to develop female reproductive organs. Later, the hormone androgen turns those embryos with a Y chromosome into males. At birth, there is no psychological difference between male and...

Honourable intentions.(first women priest)
January 1, 1995... The first woman to be ordained a priest in the Anglican Church was the Reverend Florence Tim Oi Li, a deacon and head of a girls' She was ordained by the Bishop of Hong Kong and South China in January 1944 before he and other male priests fled...

That's radical.(radical Christian sect favoring women's equality in early 1900s)
January 1, 1995... In 1904 Leila Taylor and Ana White, two senior members of the New England Shaker Church, wrote: "Woman, daughter of God, should stand side by side in ability, authority and responsibility, with man, son of God." This radical Christian sect...

Math challenged?(discrimination against women in mathematics education)
January 1, 1995... It simply isn't true that girls are crummy at math. The belief that they are is based on years of tests that showed some boys are better in some areas of mathematics, says Professor Douglas Willms at the University of British Columbia. While boys...

Notes from outerspace.(reaction to Barbie dolls that depict women as slow in math)
January 1, 1995... omplaints came rushing in in October 1992 after Mattel Canada I nc. marketed a Barbie doll that said "Math class is tough." Critics, from women engineers to the Canadian Mathematics Society, said Teen Talk Barbie perpetuated a stereotype that...

Girls only.(some schools have all-girls science and math classes)
January 1, 1995... In 1993, three California schools decided to have all-girl class room for math and science. As girls reach high school, they tend to fall behind boys in math or lose interest in it. The schools decided that teaching them separately might help...

Please sir, can I have some more?(slow gains in equal pay for women in Canada)
January 1, 1995... The wage gap between men and women is closing faster than ever. The gap narrowed almost as much in the four years between 1989 and 1992 as it did in the previous 20 years. That sounds good. However, according to Statistics Canada, the actual...

How so?(instances of men making more money than women for the same work in Canada)
January 1, 1995... In 1992, female counsellors of batttered women in Montreal shelters Were shocked to. learn they received only about half what men got for counselling violent men - $12 an hour compared with $22. The wage gap in Montreal was similar to one found...

A global view.(International Labour Organization report on wage differences between men and women)
January 1, 1995... The international Labour Organization (ILO) says the gap between men's and women's wages in the world widened considerably during the 1980s, in spite of attempts to narrow the gap. Women in Canada and the United States made some slight gains, but...

Home brutal home.(violence against women in Canada and possible solutions to this problem)
January 1, 1995... Aggression toward women starts with skimpily clad women in ads. According to a government report, such ads send out the message "that it is attractive, desirable, sexy, and right to possess women, who are almost invariably portrayed in...

Power and control.(sexual harassment of women)
January 1, 1995... Sexual harassment is often the first step in a process that ends in sexual assault. And, it, starts early. A 1993 government report contains first-hand accounts of sexual harassment from 15- and 16-year-old girts. The girls described annoying...

Time for action.(budgets for Canadian women's shelters)
January 1, 1995... Two studies were carried out in 1993 on women's shelters - one by Statistics Canada and one by Health and Welfare Canada at a total cost of $2 million. Many felt the money should have gone to help battered women rather than on the more studies....

Self-defence.(battered woman who claimed she shot her abusive husband in self-defense is acquitted of murder)
January 1, 1995... The Supreme Court of Canada widened the legal meaning of self-defence in May 1990 when it restored the jury acquittal of a battered women who shot her boyfriend. Lyn Lavallee had been charged with second-degree murder. But the court said years of...

A male view.(man's opinion of memorial to women who were murdered at Montreal Ecole Polytechnique)
January 1, 1995... On the Women's Monument Project in Vancouver, British Columbia - 14 benches of pink granite each with the name of one of the 14 women slain at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique on December 1989 - the following is inscribed: "We, their sisters and...

Mosadi.(abuse against women around the world)
January 1, 1995... The word "Mosadi" comes from the Tswana language of Southern Africa. It is the only word in Tswana for "women" and it means literally "The one who remains behind at home when men go to work." The status of hundreds of millions of women around the...

Second-class capitalists.(more women than men being laid off in Eastern Europe)
January 1, 1995... The women of Eastern Europe are suffering economically. The transition from communism to capitalism has hit women much harder than men. As overstaffed state enterprises cut back, it's the women that are laid off first. Until recently, women in...

Women in Parliament.(women in parliaments around the world)
January 1, 1995... Australia's governing Labour Party has vowed to make sure that women make up 35% of its candidates for Parliament by 2002. The party's national policy-making conference overwhelmingly supported the affirmative action quota. Women make up half the...

The value of a daughter.(mistreatment of daughters throughout the world)
January 1, 1995... One woman in Southern India summed up the position of her sisters: "Even a useless male buffalo calf fetches 100 rupees (about $3.50). A girl child means nothing but expense." Some Muslim families in India are solving this problem by selling...

Canada at the movies.(the Canadian motion picture industry)
January 1, 1995... When filmgoers think of movies, they usually think of Hollywood. Canadians have for years enjoyed and supported American films, accepting the images, themes, and stories these films had to present. In 1922, one of Hollywood's pioneer producers,...

Movies, culture, and national identity.(influence of foreign media in Canada)
January 1, 1995... When we think of feature films (or television for that matter), we tend to think of them only as entertainment. Movies are something that we watch when we want to relax, to unwind, and to escape from the routines of daily life. But feature films...

The government steps in.(Canadian government moves to increase domestic media)
January 1, 1995... The Massey Report said that government needed to step in to encourage the growth of Canadian culture. Government should intervene not to restrict the inflow of foreign cultural goods (such as movies), but rather to increase the supply of Canadian...

The business of culture.(Canadian television and motion picture industry has difficulty competing with American counterparts)
January 1, 1995... If Canadian culture is so important to the health and survival of Canada as a nation, why isn't there more of it? Why is government support for Canadian cultural activities necessary? To answer these question, we need to understand two things....

New initiatives for survival.(Canadian motion picture industry becomes more prominent with help of Canadian Film Development Corp.)
January 1, 1995... Early efforts to establish a feature film industry in Canada met with little success. Canadian-produced feature films, few and far between, could not compete successfully against films from the United States, Britain, and France. Moreover,...

Women and the movies.(women in Canadian movies)
January 1, 1995... One of the most important characteristics of the Canadian film industry is that it offers an alternative to the themes and styles that dominate Hollywood movies. To make this point, let's look at how women are depicted in Canadian as opposed to...

Seeing Canada in the movies.(how Canadian films portray Canadians)
January 1, 1995... Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, few of the characters (male or female) in Canadian Films display the qualities so charactertistic of Hollywood's leading actors. Instead, Canadian films have focussed more on relatively ordinary people trying...