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Tag: females (demographic group)

  • Trump repeatedly celebrated the inclusion of transgender women in his beauty pageant | CNN Politics

    Trump repeatedly celebrated the inclusion of transgender women in his beauty pageant | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Years before he said he was running for president to “defeat the cult of gender ideology,” Donald Trump welcomed and praised the inclusion of transgender women in the Miss Universe pageant.

    In since unreported radio and television interviews from spring and summer 2012, Trump celebrated the interest in a 23-year-old transgender woman named Jenna Talackova participating in a Canadian pageant. He then later effusively praised the winner of the Miss USA pageant, Olivia Culpo, for saying that transgender women should be allowed to compete.

    Trump, then the owner of the Miss Universe pageant, would go on to cite the possible participation of transgender women in Olympic sports to justify his decision to end a ban on transgender pageant participants.

    But a decade later, as he geared up to run for a second White House term, Trump promised to “ban men from participating in women’s sports,” when speaking about transgender athletes – a reflection of how restricting trans rights has become a powerful talking point among conservatives and a potential a litmus test for Republican candidates.

    Since launching his 2024 campaign Trump has also referred to gender-affirming surgery for minors as “child sexual mutilation,” said he’d seek to make such surgeries illegal if he returned to the White House, said he’d sign executive orders instructing federal agencies not to promote transitioning at any age, and ask Congress to pass a bill requiring the government to only recognize only genders assigned at birth.

    That’s a departure from how he approached the inclusion of transgender people in society more than a decade ago.

    For example, at the Miss USA pageant in June 2012, Culpo said she welcomed the participation of transgender women in the competition – a comment that Trump supported.

    “I do think that that would be fair, but I can understand that people would be a little apprehensive to take that road because there is a tradition of natural-born women,” Culpo said when asked if transgender participants should be allowed. “But today where there are so many surgeries and so many people out there who have a need to change for a happier life, I do accept that because I believe it’s a free country.”

    That seemed to go over well with Trump.

    Donald Trump poses with Miss USA 2012, Olivia Culpo, at a news conference after she was named the new Miss Universe during the 2012 Miss Universe Pageant at PH Live at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino on December 19, 2012, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

    “She gave a great answer, a very tough question – on transgender – just the question everybody wants to hear, and she gave a great answer and she really did a great job,” Trump said praising Culpo on Fox and Friends in June 2012.

    “It was a very cool answer,” added Trump. “Great, [she] gave a great answer.”

    “Her answer was a very intelligent answer and that’s one of the reasons I assume the judges picked her,” Trump said in another June interview on Fox and Friends.

    In 2012, Talackova was allowed to compete after threatening legal action over the Miss Universe organization ban on transgender contestants, which had come under scrutiny.

    Trump claimed to CNN at the time he personally made the decision to end the ban before even knowing about the legal threats from Talackova’s attorney, Gloria Allred.

    A statement released by the Trump Organization at the time said the change was to modernize the pageant.

    “Pageant rules have been modernized to ensure this type of issue does not occur again,” read the statement, issued on Trump’s behalf by his then-attorney Michael Cohen.

    Cohen told CNN on Thursday the decision was made to follow Olympic guidelines on transgender athletes. At the time, the Olympics allowed the participation of transgender athletes who had sex reassignment surgery and two years of hormone therapy.

    In an April 2012 appearance on “The Laura Ingraham Show,” Trump celebrated the buzz associated with Talackova’s entry into the pageant.

    “Well it became a big, big deal up in Canada,” Trump said. “And you have the Miss Canada, which is essentially the Miss Universe. It’s the pre-Miss Universe, it’s the screening for Miss Universe – and a woman, transgender was in.”

    “But there’s many, many, many contestants and they agreed to let her, based on the laws of Canada and the laws in the United States, they agreed to let her participate,” he added. “So I will say there’s, there’s great interest and if you look at it from a show business standpoint, that’s wonderful. But there is certainly great interest.”

    In an interview on Fox News also in April of 2012, Trump defended his decision to let Talackova compete.

    Miss California USA Carrie Prejean (R) and Shanna Moakler, co-executive director of the Miss California USA pageant (L), listen to Donald Trump, the owner of the Miss Universe Organization, announce during a news conference that Prejean would retain her title in New York May 12, 2009.

    “It has become a hot subject. It is being talked about all over the world right now,” Trump said. “This is a young woman, who, according to the laws of Canada and according to the laws of the United States, is allowed to enter the pageant system.”

    In the same interview, Trump cited the Olympics as part of his rationale.

    “We didn’t have a rule. This is sort of new territory. We are going by at some point, the Olympic rules because the Olympics are having a very big question about this – should this be allowed,” Trump said. “I said we have 58 contestants in Canada, I said let her run and maybe she will win and if she wins, she will go to Miss Universe. And I think I made the right decision, I feel fine with the decision.”

    Trump’s decision was praised by the LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD at the time.

    “For more than two weeks, the Miss Universe Organization and Mr. Trump made it clear to GLAAD that they were open to making a policy change to include women who are transgender. We appreciate that he and his team responded swiftly and appropriately,” they said in a statement.

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  • Southern Baptist Convention votes to uphold removal of Saddleback Church over women pastors after appeal by Rick Warren | CNN

    Southern Baptist Convention votes to uphold removal of Saddleback Church over women pastors after appeal by Rick Warren | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention voted to affirm a decision made earlier this year to remove Saddleback Church, a major southern California congregation founded by the pastor and author Rick Warren, due to its having women pastors.

    Representatives at the conference in New Orleans overwhelmingly supported the decision to expel the church, according to the vote count reported Wednesday morning, despite pleas a day earlier by Warren, the author of “The Purpose Driven Life.” The representatives, known as messengers, also voted to affirm the ousters of two other churches, including Fern Creek in Louisville, Kentucky, which has had a female pastor since 1993.

    The vote to uphold those removals came just a few hours before a two-thirds majority of the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest Protestant denomination in the United States – separately voted to approve an amendment to its constitution that would more broadly prohibit churches from having women hold any pastoral title.

    The amendment must pass by a two-thirds vote two years in a row, with Wednesday’s vote marking its first.

    The Baptist Press, which describes itself as the SBC’s official news service, reported Saddleback was found “not to be in friendly cooperation” with the SBC’s “statement of faith,” which says in part that “the office of pastor is limited to men.”

    Warren was among those who asked the SBC to reverse the February decision on Tuesday. He appealed to the representatives to “act like Southern Baptists who have historically ‘agreed to disagree’ on dozens of doctrines in order to share a common mission,” per the Times, which reported Warren appointed a husband and wife to succeed him after his retirement in 2021. Three more women were ordained as pastors at Saddleback that year, according to Baptist Press.

    Voters were unconvinced: Per the Baptist Press, 9,437 votes were cast in favor of upholding the decision, compared to 1,212 against. Fern Creek Baptist’s appeal was similarly rejected, with 9,700 voting in favor of upholding the decision and 806 voting against.

    CNN has reached out to the SBC, Saddleback Church and Fern Creek Baptist for comment.

    The ousting of a third church, Freedom Church in Vero Beach, Florida, was also upheld. That church was expelled for a separate reason unrelated to the question of female pastors.

    Churches not found in friendly cooperation effectively lose their affiliation with the wider convention, though they could still operate congregations.

    The fight at one of the nation’s most important evangelical bellwethers is playing out against the backdrop of broader political and cultural battles over the rights of women and LGBTQ people.

    In the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, an energized, conservative faction within the GOP has pushed for strict abortion restrictions and limits on gender-affirming care for transgender people in statehouses across the country. That push has also triggered a backlash among the broader electorate, with Democrats notching victories in competitive 2022 midterm races and 2023 elections where those cultural clashes have taken center stage.

    Andy Wood, who currently pastors Saddleback Church, pushed back after the SBC’s decision to remove the church in a video in March, noting that all the church’s elders were men but that they could “empower women and mobilize women to use their spiritual gifts in the local church.”

    “This is a historic moment,” Wood said. “The church at large, the global church is looking for good Bible believing examples of empowering women for ministry. So Saddleback, we want to lead the way in that conversation.”

    “If we can be a part of mobilizing and empowering a whole generation of women, we would love nothing more than to lean into that conversation and empower women for ministry.”

    The proposed amendment taken up Wednesday would add a qualification to Article III of the SBC Constitution, saying churches will be considered in friendly cooperation only if they do “not affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.”

    Mike Law, the pastor of Arlington Baptist Church in Arlington, Virginia, has identified himself as the person who introduced the amendment. In a video, he explained the goal was to “encourage Southern Baptists to keep in step with the spirit and the scriptures on the subject of the Pastoral office.

    “The Baptist faith and message announces our belief that the office of Pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture, and this amendment would clarify that our cooperation as churches is in accord with this particular belief.”

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  • This 1960s trailblazer of erotic pop art died just as she was finding fame | CNN

    This 1960s trailblazer of erotic pop art died just as she was finding fame | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Untold Art History investigates lesser-known stories in art, spotlighting pioneering artists who were overlooked during their lifetimes, as well as uncovering new insights into influential artworks that radically shift our understanding of them.



    CNN
     — 

    Throughout Evelyne Axell’s short but radical career, the Belgian artist revered the female body in psychedelic hues rendered in gleaming enamel. Nude women recline in acid green or cerulean blue fields under open skies; in one portrait, bodies and landscape become indistinguishable, with rings of colors forming the volume of a perm and tufts of grass the pubic hair.

    She delighted in double meanings. Axell’s most famous artwork, of a woman licking an ice cream cone, could be both a summery advertisement or an explicit pornographic scene. She named another painting, of red heels on a gas pedal, “Axell-ération” — an implied self-portrait, like many of her works.

    But the young actor-turned-Pop artist, who was working in the 1960s and early ’70s and had been trained by the famed surrealist artist René Magritte, had her career cut short. In 1972, only a handful of years into painting, she died in a car crash and faded into relative obscurity. Only in the past decade as curators have revisited the pop art movement beyond celebrated male artists — such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton — has Axell arisen as one of the many women co-opting mass media to engage with the social structures and politics of the ‘60s.

    “If you asked almost anybody to name a woman pop artist, you would probably get a blank stare,” said Catherine Morris, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, which hosted the touring show “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968” in 2011. The landmark group show featured Axell and contemporaries including Pauline Boty and Chryssa.

    “(If this) period of emergence of women Pop artists had even been a couple of years later, we probably would have been more aware,” Morris continued, pointing to the 1970s as a turning point for women artists in the wake of second-wave feminism. “This whole group of women who covered this decade were dramatically overlooked.”

    Since “Seductive Subversion,” which first exhibited at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Axell’s work has been included in a host of significant group shows that take a more expansive, international view of pop art and foreground women. And in 2021, she achieved a significant posthumous milestone, with the Museum of Modern Art in New York adding “Axell-ération” to its collection. But institutional solo exhibitions remain few and far between, with retrospectives hosted by Museum Abteiberg in western Germany and the remote Swiss Alps art center Muzeum Susch 10 years apart. (Perhaps, in part, because of her limited output.)

    Now, two of Axell’s playful, erotic artworks— both painted with her signature application of enamel on plexiglass — are poised to make history at Christie’s, in her first major New York sale. “Paysage” a dreamy pastoral nude, is expected to surpass her record of $140,000, set in 2017, with a high estimate of $200,000; “L’Amazone”, a sensual blue-ombre hued portrait, could also come close at $120,000. But such sales for Axell are infrequent, according to Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art.

    “She made very little work — she was 37-years-old when she died,” Friedlander said in a phone call. “So, in a way, the market doesn’t have enough to know what to do with her. These (paintings) are very special and very rare.”

    The decade following Axell’s death saw the emergence of a number of women artists who unabashedly expressed female sexuality, painting and photographing their own bodies, and subverting erotic or pornographic imagery. Artists such as Joan Semmel and Marilyn Minter believed that feminism should be inclusive of sexual agency, but as Morris explained, they faced criticism for doing so.

    Many of Axell's works are self-portraits, though she often obscured her identity by signing only with her last name.

    “The feminist artists who emerged in the 1970s and into the 1980s and 90s were very much taken to task by orthodox feminism in relationship to them utilizing their own sexuality, their own bodies, their own beauty,” she said.

    Axell might have been part of this crucial wave; curators and scholars are still unpacking her prescient feminist ideas, and the paradisical world she set them in. Instead, she hid her identity, signing her works with only her last name, after facing derision from male art critics, according to the exhibition at Muzeum Susch. Her stylistic approach — a mix of pop art influences and dreamy surrealist settings — is still underrecognized, according to Morris.

    “She acts as a historical bridge (between surrealism and pop art),” she said. “And I think that that’s something that’s dramatically unexplored.”

    Axell experimented with materials, applying enamel paint to plexiglas to heighten the dreamlike qualities of her work, as in this painting,

    Skilled at challenging expectations around her own beauty, sexuality and sense of self in her work, Axell was also politically engaged, producing portraits of the African American activist Angela Davis and a painting responding to the Kent State campus shootings in 1970.

    “Despite all aggressiveness, my universe abounds above all in an unconditional love for life,” Axell said in her only interview in 1970, according to a publication by Muzeum Susch. “My subject is clear: nudity and femininity experiment in the utopia of a bio-botanical freedom; that means a freedom without frustration nor gradual submission, and that tolerates only the limits that it sets itself.”

    One of Morris’ favorite works, shown at the Brooklyn Museum, embodies this spirit: an abstracted view of a woman’s torso, the curves of her body like peaks and valleys, her vulva covered in a real tuffet of green fur. Called “Petite fourrure verte” or “Small green fur,” the intimate perspective was based on a photograph Axell’s filmmaker husband, Jean Antoine, had taken of her.

    “It’s from 1970, just a couple years before her death,” Morris said. “So for me, it really epitomizes what would have been — what was to come.”

    Top image: “Axell-ération” from 1965.

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  • FDA advisers vote unanimously in support of over-the-counter birth-control pill | CNN

    FDA advisers vote unanimously in support of over-the-counter birth-control pill | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously on Wednesday in support of making the birth-control pill Opill available over-the-counter, saying the benefits outweigh the risks.

    Two FDA advisory panels agreed that people would use Opill safely and effectively and said groups such as adolescents and those with limited literacy would be able to take the pill at the same time every day without help from a health care worker.

    The advisers were asked to vote on whether people were likely to use the tablet properly so that the benefits would exceed the risks. Seventeen voted yes. Zero voted no or abstained.

    Opill manufacturer Perrigo hailed the vote as a “groundbreaking” move for women’s health.

    “Perrigo is proud to lead the way in making contraception more accessible to women in the U.S.,” Murray Kessler, Perrigo’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “We are motivated by the millions of people who need easy access to safe and effective contraception.”

    The FDA doesn’t have to follow its advisers’ advice, but it often does. It is expected to decide whether to approve the over-the-counter pill this summer.

    If it’s approved, this will be the first birth-control pill available over the counter in the United States. Opill is a “mini-pill” that uses only the hormone progestin.

    At Wednesday’s meeting, Dr. Margery Gass of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine thanked the FDA for its consideration of switching Opill to an over-the-counter product.

    “I think this represents a landmark in our history of women’s health. Unwanted pregnancies can really derail a woman’s life, and especially an adolescent’s life,” she said.

    The FDA has faced pressure to allow Opill to go over-the-counter from lawmakers as well as health care providers.

    Unwanted pregnancies are a public health issue in the US, where almost half of all pregnancies are unintended, and rates are especially high among lower-income women, Black women and those who haven’t completed high school.

    In March 2022, 59 members of Congress wrote a letter to FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf about OTC contraception.

    “This is a critical issue for reproductive health, rights, and justice. Despite decades of proven safety and effectiveness, people still face immense barriers to getting birth control due to systemic inequities in our healthcare system,” the lawmakers wrote.

    A recent study showed that it’s become harder for women to access reproductive health care services more broadly – such as routine screenings and birth control – in recent years.

    About 45% of women experienced at least one barrier to reproductive health care services in 2021, up 10% from 2017. Nearly 19% reported at least three barriers in 2021, up from 16% in 2017.

    Increasing reproductive access for women and adolescents was a resounding theme among the FDA advisers.

    “We can take this opportunity to increase access, reduce disparities and, most importantly, increase the reproductive autonomy of the women of our nation,” said Dr. Jolie Haun of the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital and the University of Utah.

    Dr. Karen Murray, deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Nonprescription Drugs, said the agency understands the importance of “increased access to effective contraception” but hinted that the FDA would need more data from the manufacturer.

    Some of the advisers and FDA scientists expressed concern that some of Perrigo’s data was unreliable due to overreporting of “improbable dosing.”

    Murray said the lack of sufficient information from the study poses challenges for approval.

    “It would have been a much easier time for the agency if the applicant had submitted a development program and an actual use study that was very easy to interpret and did not have so many challenges. But that was not what happened for us. And so the FDA has been put in a very difficult position of trying to determine whether it is likely that women will use this product safely and effectively in the nonprescription setting,” she said. “But I wanted to again emphasize that FDA does realize how very important women’s health is and how important it is to try to increase access to effective contraception for US women.”

    Ultimately, the advisers said, they don’t want further studies of Opill to delay the availability of the product in an over-the-counter setting.

    “I just wanted to say that the improbable dosing issue is important, and I don’t think it’s been adequately addressed and certainly leads to some uncertainty in the findings. But despite this, I would not recommend another actual use study this time, and I think we can make a decision on the totality of the evidence,” said Kate Curtis of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    Curtis said she voted yes because “Opill has the potential to have a huge positive public health impact.”

    Earlier in the discussion, Dr. Leslie Walker-Harding of the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital said the pill is just as safe as many other medications available on store shelves.

    “The safety profile is so good that we would need to take every other medicine off the market like Benadryl, ibuprofen, Tylenol, which causes deaths and people can get any amount of that without any oversight. And this is extremely safe, much safer than all three of those medications, and incorrect use still doesn’t appear to have problematic issues,” she said.

    Dr. Katalin Roth of the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences also emphasized the safety of the pill over the 50 years it has been approved as a prescription drug in the US.

    “The risks to women of an unintended pregnancy are much greater than any of the things we were discussing as risks of putting this pill out out over-the-counter,” she said. “The history of women’s contraception is a struggle for women’s control over their reproduction, and we need to trust women.”

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  • Breast density changes over time could be linked to breast cancer risk, study finds | CNN

    Breast density changes over time could be linked to breast cancer risk, study finds | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Breast density is known to naturally decrease as a woman ages, and now a study suggests that the more time it takes for breast density to decline, the more likely it is that the woman could develop breast cancer.

    Researchers have long known that women with dense breasts have a higher risk of breast cancer. But according to the study, published last week in the journal JAMA Oncology, the rate of breast density changes over time also appears to be associated with the risk of cancer being diagnosed in that breast.

    “We know that invasive breast cancer is rarely diagnosed simultaneously in both breasts, thus it is not a surprise that we have observed a much slower decline in the breast that eventually developed breast cancer compared to the natural decline in density with age,” Shu Jiang, an associate professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and first author of the new study, wrote in an email.

    Breast density refers to the amount of fibrous and glandular tissue in a person’s breasts compared with the amount of fatty tissue in the breasts – and breast density can be seen on a mammogram.

    “Because women have their mammograms taken annually or biennially, the change of breast density over time is naturally available,” Jiang said in the email. “We should make full use of this dynamic information to better inform risk stratification and guide more individualized screening and prevention approaches.”

    The researchers, from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, analyzed health data over the course of 10 years among 947 women in the St. Louis region who completed routine mammograms. A mammogram is an X-ray picture of the breast that doctors use to look for early signs of breast cancer.

    The women in the study were recruited from November 2008 to April 2012, and they had gotten mammograms through October 2020. The average age of the participants was around 57.

    Among the women, there were 289 cases of breast cancer diagnosed, and the researchers found that breast density was higher at the start of the study for the women who later developed breast cancer compared with those who remained cancer-free.

    The researchers also found that there was a significant decrease in breast density among all the women over the course of 10 years, regardless of whether they later developed breast cancer, but the rate of density decreasing over time was significantly slower among breasts in which cancer was later diagnosed.

    “This study found that evaluating longitudinal changes in breast density from digital mammograms may offer an additional tool for assessing risk of breast cancer and subsequent risk reduction strategies,” the researchers wrote.

    Not only is breast density a known risk factor for breast cancer, dense breast tissue can make mammograms more difficult to read.

    “There are two issues here. First, breast density can make it more difficult to fully ‘see through’ the breast on a mammogram, like looking through a frosted glass. Thus, it can be harder to detect a breast cancer,” Dr. Hal Burstein, clinical investigator in the Breast Oncology Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was not involved in the new study, said in an email. “Secondly, breast density is often thought to reflect the estrogen exposure or estrogen levels in women, and the greater the estrogen exposure, the greater the risk of developing breast cancer.”

    In March, the US Food and Drug Administration published updates to its mammography regulations, requiring mammography facilities to notify patients about the density of their breasts.

    “Breast density can have a masking effect on mammography, where it can be more difficult to find a breast cancer within an area of dense breast tissue,” Jiang wrote in her email.

    “Even when you take away the issue of finding it, breast density is an independent risk factor for developing breast cancer. Although there is lots of data that tell us dense breast tissue is a risk factor, the reason for this is not clear,” she said. “It may be that development of dense tissue and cancer are related to the same biological processes or hormonal influences.”

    The findings of the new study demonstrate that breast density serves as a risk factor for breast cancer – but women should be aware of their other risk factors too, said Dr. Maxine Jochelson, chief of the breast imaging service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who was not involved in the study.

    “It makes sense to some extent that the longer your breast stays dense, theoretically, the more likely it is to develop cancer. And so basically, it expands on the data that dense breasts are a risk,” Jochelson said, adding that women with dense breasts should ask for supplemental imaging when they get mammograms.

    But other factors that can raise the risk of breast cancer include having a family history of cancer, drinking too much alcohol, having a high-risk lesion biopsied from the breast or having a certain genetic mutation.

    For instance, women should know that “density may not affect their risk so much if they have the breast cancer BRCA 1 or 2 mutation because their risk is so high that it may not make it much higher,” Jochelson said.

    Some ways to reduce the risk of breast cancer include keeping a healthy weight, being physically active, drinking alcohol in moderation or not at all and, for some people, taking medications such as tamoxifen and breastfeeding your children, if possible.

    “Breast density is a modest risk factor. The ‘average’ woman in the US has a 1 in 8 lifetime chance of developing breast cancer. Women with dense breasts have a slightly greater risk, about 1 in 6, or 1 in 7. So the lifetime risk goes up from 12% to 15%. That still means that most women with dense breasts will not develop breast cancer,” Burstein said in his email.

    “Sometimes radiologists will recommend additional breast imaging to women with dense breast tissue on mammograms,” he added.

    The US Preventive Services Task Force – a group of independent medical experts whose recommendations help guide doctors’ decisions – recommends biennial screening for women starting at age 50. The task force says that a decision to start screening earlier “should be an individual one.” Many medical groups, including the American Cancer Society and Mayo Clinic, emphasize that women have the option to start screening with a mammogram every year starting at age 40.

    “It’s also very clear that breast density tends to be highest in younger women, premenopausal women, and for almost all women, it tends to go down with age. However, the risk of breast cancer goes up with age. So these two things are a little bit at odds with each other,” said Dr. Freya Schnabel, director of breast surgery at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center and professor of surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York, who was not involved in the new study.

    “So if you’re a 40-year-old woman and your breasts are dense, you could think about that as just being really kind of age-appropriate,” she said. “The take-home message that’s very, very practical and pragmatic right now is that if you have dense breasts, whatever your age is, even if you’re postmenopausal – maybe even specifically, if you are postmenopausal – and your breasts are not getting less dense the way the average woman’s does, that it really is a reason to seek out adjunctive imaging in addition to just mammography, to use additional diagnostic tools, like ultrasound or maybe even MRI, if there are other risk factors.”

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  • Opinion: Mifepristone saved my life | CNN

    Opinion: Mifepristone saved my life | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Roxanne Jones, a founding editor of ESPN The Magazine and former vice president at ESPN, has been a producer, reporter and editor at the New York Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Jones is co-author of “Say it Loud: An Illustrated History of the Black Athlete.” She talks politics, sports and culture weekly on Philadelphia’s 900AM WURD. The views expressed here are solely hers. Read more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    The ruling earlier this month by a Texas federal judge to suspend the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a drug that is used frequently for medication abortions, is very personal for me.

    That’s because I took mifepristone years ago during a miscarriage, and it saved my life.

    When I was prescribed mifepristone, it had not yet taken center stage in America’s abortion wars. I did not have to make a rushed road trip across state lines to get my medicine, unlike many women who need the drug but live in one of the many states that have restricted access to medication abortion or passed near-total bans on abortion.

    I was not forced to set up a secret meet-up with a stranger in order to buy my medicine on the black market, as several women I spoke to recently said they planned to do. Nor did I have to order mifepristone online and find myself navigating the many scammers taking advantage of the current patchwork of state abortion laws in the US.

    Mifepristone is one of two drugs used in a medication abortion and the other, misoprostol, was not subject to the ruling by the Texas judge. The two drugs can be administered to someone having a miscarriage, allowing them to terminate the pregnancy when the fetus is not viable.

    It happened some years ago: After experiencing more than a day of hemorrhaging during the first trimester of my pregnancy, I visited my ob-gyn, who explained after examining me that my blood pressure was dropping rapidly and the heavy bleeding I was experiencing was an unmistakable sign of a miscarriage.

    For many women, being prescribed mifepristone is part of their routine medical care. Not so in my case: As my doctor explained, I was facing a dire medical emergency. I was grateful for the medication that saved my life.

    My miscarriage took me by surprise. I had loved being pregnant the first time around, about a decade earlier. And as a healthy woman, I had no reason for fear when I became pregnant again. By the time I was administered mifepristone, I was losing a life that I had already begun to love. And like many other women, despite my level of education or economic status, I could not outrun the statistics that put Black women at higher risk.

    Up to one in four known pregnancies will end in a miscarriage. And for Black women, the numbers are alarmingly higher. According to an analysis of 4.6 million pregnancies in seven countries, the risk of a miscarriage for Black women is 43% higher than for White women.

    In the Black community, women have traditionally been taught to bear their burdens silently — keep your business to yourself — even after something as devastating as pregnancy loss. We are conditioned to do as I did back then, and keep it moving as we try to outrun the long list of statistics that tell us our lives are in danger from every direction, whether it be from health care risks to societal injustices or other stressors.

    During my miscarriage, I was a woman who was afraid, hemorrhaging and in excruciating pain, in desperate need of safe, emergency medical care. Thanks to the administration of mifepristone, I was allowed dignity during my miscarriage. It’s what every woman deserves — whether it be facing a potentially life-threatening miscarriage or seeking an abortion.

    I learned from my experience that every miscarriage matters. Women must have access to whatever medicines and counseling we need to help us heal and that includes mifepristone. What we don’t need is to be criminalized by politicians and punitive reproductive laws that have long been out of step with public opinion. Despite the continuing political attacks on women’s reproductive rights, more than 61% of US adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Center.

    After the US Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to intervene, Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary order to preserve the status quo, ensuring access to the drug while giving the justices more time to study the issue.

    I am hoping the justices can put politics aside and focus on the science surrounding the safety of mifepristone, a drug that, thankfully, I had access to when my life was in danger. Mifepristone, a synthetic steroid, is even safer than common prescription drugs including penicillin and Viagra.

    Following the science demands that, regardless of where you stand on the issue of abortion, consideration must be made for cases like mine and the millions of other women who for years have safely used this medication for complications surrounding miscarriages.

    We do not know how the legal fight over medication abortion will unfold. But women across the nation – in blue and red states alike – are watching. Punitive laws like the one signed last week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seek to criminalize reproductive care providers. And worse, they are stripping us of rights that men take for granted – it’s unlikely they will be prohibited by the law from making health care decisions about their own bodies.

    It must end. And I’m betting that whether it be with our voice or our votes, women will have the last word.

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  • Sex positivity after 70: Marilyn Minter’s sensual photographs of couples in their golden years | CNN

    Sex positivity after 70: Marilyn Minter’s sensual photographs of couples in their golden years | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    What does intimacy look like for seniors? There’s no end to sex scenes and other steamy content featuring the young and unwrinkled, but past a certain age, popular culture largely draws a blank — or treats sex as a punchline.

    Last year, the artist Marilyn Minter set out to change that, gathering a group of men and women aged 70 and older in her New York studio to showcase a lesser-seen side of sex and relationships. In erotic and colorful images, the seniors are stripped down to lingerie or briefs; they hug, kiss and caress each other in the heat of the moment. The photographs beckon our attention to challenge something still seen as taboo, showing playful, loving moments of pleasure.

    “There’s so much contempt for elder sex. Even one of the models that I worked with said, ‘Who wants to see all these?’” Minter recalled in a video call with CNN.

    “My whole thought process going into it was that we’re pioneers,” she continued of the unabashedly sexualized context. “Nobody’s ever shot elder people affectionately, and with any kind of elegance. And that was my goal — to make to make them look very desirable.”

    A handful of the ensuing images were originally published in the New York Times Magazine, accompanying a candid editorial feature about seniors’ sex lives. Minter is now publishing the series in full in the forthcoming book “Elder Sex,” and exhibiting them at New York gallery LGDR. The exhibition, which opened in April, is her first solo show in the city since the Brooklyn Museum mounted her retrospective “Pretty/Dirty” in 2016, and features highlights from her five-decade-long career, as well as other new bodies of work.

    In “Elder Sex,” Minter utilized one of her signature aesthetics, which she has explored in both hyperrealistic paintings and photographs: jewel-toned, close-cropped compositions of glistening bodies, seemingly shown through the glass of a steamed-up mirror or window. But despite her credentials as one of the most important and boundary-breaking artists today — and despite stars such as Lady Gaga and Lizzo posing for her — Minter couldn’t find enough real couples willing to participate.

    The images

    “We wanted to (include) all races, all types of sex,” Minter explained. “We had a lot of trouble getting models. I’m 74. I asked all my friends — in mixed-race relationships, in lesbian relationships — and none of them would do it.”

    In the end, Minter cast actors along with the few people who had agreed. She paired them together in her studio, photographing them behind a panel of frozen glass — a trick to achieve the steamy, wet look without battling the ephemerality of water vapor. During their shoots, Minter said all her models, who were as old as 89 years old, told her they still had regular, enjoyable sex lives. Their sentiments matched the people interviewed for the New York Times Magazine article, who described deepening intimacy with their partners later in life, as well as learning to navigate and appreciate their needs as their bodies aged.

    Seniors do have regular sex lives, but it's rarely discussed. Minter says all her models told her they still enjoy intimacy.

    Minter believes there’s a sense of freedom in sex later in life that, for many people, can take time to reach.

    “When you’re young and having sex, it’s a little more performative than it is when you’re 80,” she said. As an older person, “You’re thinking, ‘This is me. Take it or leave it. I’m just going to enjoy myself. I’m not going to fake anything here.’”

    Minter acknowledges that sex and self-image is fraught for women of all ages — older women are rarely seen or taken seriously as having intimate needs, while for younger women, sexual agency is often a tightrope walk — too much of it and you can be “excoriated and slut-shamed,” Minter said.

    “When you’re 25, there’s just so much fear about young women owning sexual agency — it’s just terrifying to people,” she said.

    Marilyn Minter unveils steamy ‘shower’ images

    But the artist sees some progress in who gets to be seen as desirable on our television screens, reflecting a burgeoning broader shift in cultural attitudes around sex. She pointed to photographs in People magazine comparing the characters of “The Golden Girls” and “Sex and the City,” who are the same age at the time of the latter’s reboot on HBO Max (which is owned by CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery). “The 50s look a lot different in the 2020s!” a caption exclaimed.

    Though “The Golden Girls” also delved into romance and intimacy — and was widely-viewed as remarkably sex-positive for its time — there’s a stark contrast in how women in their 50s are presented across the two shows.

    “I thought, ‘Okay, here’s why it’s different,” she said. “Number one: People live a lot longer, and they’re healthier… Number two: there’s this thing called Viagra.” Minter laughed, adding: “But who retired at 54? To a home in Florida with three other ladies? What?”

    Minter hopes

    She hopes “Elder Sex” will not only serve as a much-needed visual reference for what intimacy can look like at older ages, but will also resonate for people who feel like their desires — and lives — are overlooked.

    “It gives permission to people who feel shame about their sexual urges,” she said. “I want this to give them permission to explore that and erase the shame.”

    “Elder Sex,” published by JBE Books, is available now.

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  • Even when women make as much as their husbands, they still do more at home | CNN Business

    Even when women make as much as their husbands, they still do more at home | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Few women will be surprised to learn that even when wives earn about the same as their husbands or more, a new Pew Research Center study finds that they still spend more time on housework and child care, while their husbands spend more time on paid work and leisure.

    “Even as financial contributions have become more equal in marriages, the way couples divide their time between paid work and home life remains unbalanced,” Pew noted.

    So who’s earning what?

    Pew found that in 29% of heterosexual marriages today, women and men earn about the same (roughly $60,000 each). “Husbands in egalitarian marriages spend about 3.5 hours more per week on leisure activities than wives do. Wives in these marriages spend roughly 2 hours more per week on caregiving than husbands do and about 2.5 hours more on housework,” the study notes.

    In 55% of opposite-sex marriages, men are the primary or sole breadwinners, earning a median of $96,000 to their wives’ $30,000.

    Meanwhile, in 16% of marriages the wives outearn their husbands as the primary (10%) or sole breadwinner (6%). In these marriages women earn a median of $88,000 to their husbands’ $35,000.

    Of all of these categories, the only one in which men are reported to spend more time caregiving than their wives is when the woman is the sole breadwinner. And the time spent per week on household chores in those marriages is split evenly between husbands and wives.

    In all instances, it’s a big change from 50 years ago — when, for instance, husbands were the primary breadwinner in 85% of marriages.

    Today, which women are most likely to be the primary or sole breadwinners can vary by age, family status, education and race.

    For instance, Pew found Black women are “significantly more likely” than other women to earn more than their husbands. For instance, 26% of Black women bring home more than their husbands, while only 17% of White women and 13% of Hispanic women do.

    But Black women with a college degree or higher and few children at home are also among the most likely to earn about the same as their husbands.

    These numbers are reported against a backdrop of society’s attitudes about who should earn more and how caregiving should be divvied up between spouses.

    Nearly half of Americans (48%) in Pew’s survey said husbands prefer to earn more than their wives, while 13% said men would prefer their wives earn about the same as them.

    What do women want? Twenty-two percent of Americans said most women want a husband who earns more, while 26% said most would want a man who earns about the same.

    Meanwhile, when it comes to having a family, 77% said that children are better off when both parents focus equally on their job and on taking care of the kids. Only 19% said children are better off when their mother focuses more on home life and their father focuses more on his job.

    The Pew study is based on three data sources: earnings data from the US Census’ Current Population Survey; data from the American Time Use Survey and a nationally representative survey of public attitudes among 5,152 US adults conducted in January.

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  • So this is how the Tupperware party ends | CNN Business

    So this is how the Tupperware party ends | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Tupperware, an iconic brand that’s woven into the fabric of post World War II America, signaled this week that it could be on its last gasp.

    Known the world over for its plastic food storage containers and its sales parties, Florida-based Tupperware warned that the company was running out of cash and needed additional money – soon – to say in operation.

    In some ways, the 77-year-old brand is still a titan: It’s, literally, a household name, and its vivid juice- and fruit-colored products are for sale in nearly 70 countries. It pulled in annual sales of $1.3 billion in 2021. But that’s down 18.7% from a year ago.

    Last October, in a massive shift in its business model, Tupperware rolled out its containers in brighter hues of red, purple and green onto Target shelves nationwide.

    But it may be too little, too late.

    Experts say this is what happens when a once-pioneering brand, beloved by families through generations, is unable to adapt to an evolving marketplace, brutal competition and attitudes and needs of younger consumers.

    “Tupperware was a disruptor in the market and in households nationwide when its plastic storage containers launched in 1946,” said Venkatesh Shankar, professor of marketing and ecommerce at Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School.

    “The company also had tremendous cultural impact. The famous neighborhood house parties where Tupperware products were sold by the host to her family and friends was a new way of marketing, combining socializing with direct sales.”

    But while the company reaped the benefits of its innovative approach for years, it ultimately couldn’t keep pace with changing times.

    History has shown, said Shankar, that nostalgia usually isn’t enough to sustain legacy brands.

    Whether or not Tupperware survives as a business, its rich history will likely endure, said William Keep, professor of marketing at the College of New Jersey School of Business.

    “I’ve been married for 50 years and we still have and use our Tupperware from when we married. Tupperware was something people gave as gifts at weddings and baby showers,” said Keep. “Clearly its a brand that focused on two things, quality and for much of its history, women.”

    Tupperware is named after Earl Tupper, a chemist in the 1940s who created lightweight, non-breakable plastic containers inspired by the seal-tight design of paint cans. The purpose was to help families save money on costly food waste in the post-war era.

    The most significant aspect of the invention was a first-of-its-kind “burping seal.” The older models of Tupperware containers would make a burp-like sound when air was let out from under the lid before it was firmly pressed and closed for an air-tight lock.

    But Tupperware products didn’t sell well in stores when they launched, according to the company, because consumers weren’t sure how to use the (back then) white and off-white containers.

    Tupperware house parties were the only way to buy the brand's plastic food containers. The parties were hosted by women in their homes and were both popular social and marketing events. (circa 1950)

    That conundrum led to an idea to demonstrate the product, which then evolved into the famous Tupperware house parties.

    The practice dove-tailed brilliantly with the rise of post-war suburbia: women had bigger homes, bigger kitchens, more money to spend, more children to feed and more responsibilities to keep house.

    Into that climate came Tupperware. Its first milky-white plastic product, the “Wonder Bowl,” cost 39 cents, according to Smithsonian Magazine; the museum has a huge Tupperware collection. Over the years, tangerine orange, baby blue and pink and kiwi green products followed.

    Tupperware parties became popular social and marketing events in the 1950s and 60s.

    The parties were much more than just a show-and-tell, said Bob Kealing, a Tupperware scholar and author of two books on the brand.

    These were glamorous affairs, akin to an afternoon tea party, where women dressed up because the parties were a feminized, soft-sell approach to selling plastic products.

    “Women wore beautiful dresses, heels, gloves. They wanted to present an upscale version of themselves because these were also events where women were recruited into the Tupperware sales force,” he said. The parties gained traction also because they were one of the few socially acceptable ways for women to make money at the time.

    Tupperware products were the centerpiece of the event, carefully stacked and presented to be shown off. “The parties were designed to be fun social gatherings,” including games and prizes, he said, and the most successful Tupperware saleswomen were sometimes rewarded with diamond rings.

    While Tupperware wasn’t the first to pioneer the direct sales model, it did scale it up in size and opportunity for women, said Tracey Deutsch, associate professor, department of history of history at University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts.

    Tupperware’s success, said Deutsch also coincided with the expansion of suburbs across the country.

    Earl Tupper, seen here in the photo, hired Brownie Wise, a Tupperware house party hostess, as his vice president of marketing in 1951.

    “Not only did women need the space to hold the Tupperware parties but also space in the kitchen to store these containers,” she said. “And it was also dependent on a certain level of household well-being. You needed to have enough food to require these storage containers.”

    Brownie Wise was perhaps the most famous Tupperware hostess of them all. Wise, a divorced single mother living in Florida, held her own Tupperware parties in the 1940s and 50s and became a budding entrepreneur. Tupper himself took notice.

    He eventually hired Wise as his vice president of marketing, an unprecedented role for women back then.

    Kealing, author of “”Life of the Party: The Remarkable Story of How Brownie Wise Built, and Lost, a Tupperware Part Empire,” said Wise became the face of the brand and was very good at it.

    “It was great marketing and the media ate it up,” he said. But she was ultimately fired by Tupper in 1957. “Tupper… saw how the brand was becoming more about her,” said Kealing.

    Traditionally, parties were the only way you could buy Tupperware. Over time, the parties became ubiquitous both in suburban and city dwellings. As the company grew, its fleet of hostesses ballooned into a global direct sales force of nearly 3 million in 2019.

    More recently, the brand was on a quest to grab the attention of Millennials and Gen Zers and become as relevant in their everyday lives as it was for their grandmas and moms.

    That meant shedding the throwback to its “Mad Men” era image, and positioning Tupperware products as buzz-worthy, higher quality and more durable than rivals, high-utility and with an environmentally-friendly purpose.

    Tupperware had to go beyond parties or sales on its own website and the brief and limited pilot programs it had tried with retailers HomeGoods, Bed Bath and Beyond, plus an earlier pilot attempt at Target itself.

    Tupperware rolled its products into Target stores nationwide in 2022, marking a significant shift in the company's decades-long direct sales strategy.

    The shift in strategy came too late. “We’ve seen this happen with Toys ‘R’ Us, Twinkie, most recently Bed Bath & Beyond,” said Shankar.

    Tupperware, he said, is facing a perfect storm of stiff competition from other brands – Rubbermaid, Glad, Pyrex, Oxo and Ziploc – selling similar products or even disposable versions for less, lack of interest from younger shoppers and lack of exciting new products and strategies to sell them.

    “Millennials, and Gen Zers especially probably aren’t aware of its iconic status and really don’t have a reason to give it another chance,” said Shankar.

    “In my mind, the company made two critical errors,” said Keep, professor of marketing at the College of New Jersey School of Business.

    “With product, it lost ground to competitors”, said Keep. “Tupperware also consciously didn’t walk away from direct selling even as these multilevel marketing strategies stagnated in the 80s and 90s. When it was clear that model was no longer working, the company should have given up on direct sales and sold through retailers.”

    Bankruptcy could be a path forward for Tupperware, said John Talbott, Director at the Center for Education and Research in Retail at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

    “The most valuable thing Tupperware owns is its brand. Like Blockbuster, the Tupperware brand will never go away,” he said. “I suspect it could file for bankruptcy and if there is a buyer for it, Target would be a great option to revive the brand with new designs and a new marketing plan.”

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  • Colombian women’s rights activist attacked with acid | CNN

    Colombian women’s rights activist attacked with acid | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Colombian police are investigating an acid attack perpetrated against a human rights activist, Lilia Patricia Cardozo, in the country’s northwestern Boyaca region, according to the city’s council.

    Cardozo is the director of a womens’ rights NGO called Plataforma Feminista Boyacense (Boyacense Feminist Platform), which works to end domestic abuse, gender violence and discrimination, including rescuing victims from the hands of abusers.

    On Monday, an unknown attacker threw a chemical substance at Cardozo while she was walking in a park. Cardozo, who is still under medical observation, suffered injuries in the left part of her face, the spokesperson for the NGO wrote on Facebook.

    The San Rafael de Tunja University Hospital said the chemical substance thrown at Cardozo affected 4% of her body, including her face, and her chest.

    Cardozo has been a target of death threats since 2022, which led the country’s National Protection Unit to approve a safety protocol to protect her last September.

    But the Boyacense Feminist Platform has accused Tunja’s local authorities of leaving Cardozo exposed by activating the safety protocol too slowly.

    Tunja’s Mayor, Alejandro Funeme, said the protocol was implemented late on February 14, due to the lack of funds.

    Local police are investigating the incident and working to identify the attacker, who faces a charges of femicide.

    Women and human rights defenders are particularly at risk in Colombia. In 2022, 614 cases of femicide were reported, according to Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office.

    Since 2016, more than 500 human rights activists have been killed in the country, making it one of the deadliest countries for human rights defenders worldwide, according to Human Rights Watch.

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  • UN tells Afghan staff to stay home after Taliban bans women from working with the organization | CNN

    UN tells Afghan staff to stay home after Taliban bans women from working with the organization | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The United Nations has instructed all of its personnel in Afghanistan to stay away from its offices in the country, after the Taliban banned Afghan women from working with the organization.

    “UN national personnel – women and men – have been instructed not to report to UN offices, with only limited and calibrated exceptions made for critical tasks,” the organization said in a statement.

    It comes after Afghan men working for the UN in Kabul stayed home last week in solidarity with their female colleagues.

    The UN said the Taliban’s move was an extension of a previous ban, enforced last December, that prohibited Afghan women from working for national and international non-governmental organizations.

    The organization said the ban is “the latest in a series of discriminatory measures implemented by the Taliban de facto authorities with the goal of severely restricting women and girls’ participation in most areas of public and daily life in Afghanistan.”

    It will continue to “assess the scope, parameters and consequences of the ban, and pause activities where impeded,” the statement said, adding that the “matter will be under constant review.”

    Several female UN staff in the country had already experienced restrictions on their movements since the Taliban seized power in 2021, including harassment and detention.

    Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN Deputy Special Representative, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, called the Taliban’s decision an “unparalleled violation of human rights” last week.

    “The lives of Afghanistan women are at stake,” he said, adding, “It is not possible to reach women without women.”

    The UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, is engaging with the Taliban at the highest level to “seek an immediate reversal of the order,” the UN said last week.

    “In the history of the United Nations, no other regime has ever tried to ban women from working for the Organization just because they are women. This decision represents an assault against women, the fundamental principles of the UN, and on international law,” Otunbayeva said.

    Other figures within the organization also condemned the move, with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights calling it “utterly despicable.”

    After the Taliban banned female aid workers in December, at least half a dozen major foreign aid groups temporarily suspended their operations in Afghanistan – diminishing the already scarce resources available to a country in dire need of them.

    The Taliban’s return to power preceded a deepening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, worsening issues that had long plagued the country. After the takeover, the US and its allies froze about $7 billion of the country’s foreign reserves and cut off international funding – crippling an economy heavily dependent on overseas aid.

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  • Iran installs cameras to identify women breaking dress code | CNN

    Iran installs cameras to identify women breaking dress code | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Iranian authorities are to use cameras in public places to identify women who violate the country’s hijab law, state media reported.

    Women in Iran risk arrest for not covering their hair. Many have been defying the mandatory dress code as part of the widespread protests that followed the death of a young woman in custody for allegedly violating hijab rules.

    Authorities, though, show no sign of backing down on the issue.

    “In an innovative measure and in order to prevent tension and conflicts in implementing the hijab law, Iranian police will use smart cameras in public places to identify people who break the norms,” the state-aligned Tasnim news agency quoted police as saying.

    After the women have been identified, they would be sent warning messages which detail the specific time and place they had “violated” the law, according to Tasnim.

    “In the context of preserving values, protecting family privacy and maintaining the mental health and peace of mind of the community, any kind of individual or collective behavior against the law, will not be tolerated,” Tasnim reported.

    A viral video earlier this month showed a man throwing yogurt on two women for not wearing the hijab.

    Both were later arrested for breaking Iran’s dress code.

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  • Iranian women arrested for not wearing hijab after yogurt thrown on them | CNN

    Iranian women arrested for not wearing hijab after yogurt thrown on them | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Two women in Iran were arrested after a man threw yogurt on them for not wearing the hijab at a store in the northeastern city of Shandiz, according to a video and report published by the Mizan News Agency, the state-run media for Iran’s judiciary.

    Video of Thursday’s incident shows a man approaching one of the women who is unveiled and speaking to her before proceeding to grab a tub of yogurt from the store and throwing it, hitting both women in the head.

    Iranian women risk arrest for not covering their hair. Many have been defying the mandatory dress code as part of protests that followed the death of a young woman in custody who allegedly violated hijab rules.

    The video appears to show a male staff member removing the suspect from the store. CNN is not able to verify what was said immediately before the confrontation.

    The two women were arrested after being issued an arrest warrant for failing to wear the hijab in public, according to Mizan News Agency. The incident is under investigation, and the male suspect has been arrested for a disturbance of order, Iranian officials said.

    On Saturday the Iranian authorities repeated their stance that wearing the hijab was compulsory,

    “The important matter is that today we have a legal mandate,” said Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, according to Reuters. “The legal mandate makes it mandatory for everyone to follow the law.”

    “If there are people who say that they do not share this belief of ours (the mandatory hijab), then this is a place for scientific and cultural centers as well as schools to discuss this and convince them,” Raisi added.

    Iran’s Ministry of Interior said that the “hijab is an unquestionable religious necessity,” according to a tweet from the agency on Saturday.

    Iranians have taken to the streets nationwide in protest for several months against Iran’s mandatory hijab law, and political and social issues across the country, following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police in September.

    Women have burned their headscarves and cut their hair, with some schoolgirls removing their headscarves in classrooms.

    Those arrested for participating in anti-government demonstrations have faced various forms of abuse and torture, including electric shocks, controlled drowning, rape and mock executions.

    School students who protested faced being detained and taken to mental health institutions.

    Some protestors have even been sentenced to death and executed.

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  • The company behind Johnnie Walker and Guinness appoints first female CEO | CNN Business

    The company behind Johnnie Walker and Guinness appoints first female CEO | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    One of the world’s largest alcoholic drinks companies has appointed its first female CEO.

    Diageo, which makes Guinness beer and Johnnie Walker whisky, said Tuesday that chief operating officer Debra Crew would succeed Ivan Menezes, who will retire from the company after 10 years at the helm.

    Crew is to take over on July 1, the company said in a statement. Her appointment means women will make up more than 50% of Diageo’s executive committee, it added.

    Diageo is the seventh-largest member of the FTSE 100

    (UKX)     index and will now become the largest UK-listed company led by a woman. There are just nine other FTSE 100

    (UKX)     companies led by women, including pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline

    (GLAXF)     and bank NatWest.

    Diageo is the world’s fourth biggest alcoholic drinks company by market value, after AB InBev

    (BUD)     and China’s Wuliangye Yibin and Kweichow Moutai. It is fifth biggest if French luxury goods group LVMH

    (LVMHF)    , which sells Moët champagne and Hennessy cognac, is included.

    Menezes is stepping down following a very successful tenure at Diageo, during which the company’s share price has almost doubled. It sells more Scotch whisky, tequila, vodka and gin by net sales value than any other business in the world.

    “Ivan has transformed Diageo’s global footprint, brand portfolio and strategic focus, positioning our business as a clear leader in premium drinks,” chairman Javier Ferrán said in the statement.

    “The Board has diligently planned for Ivan’s successor, and we are delighted to have appointed a leader of Debra’s calibre to the role,” he added. “I have no doubt that Diageo is in the right hands for the next phase of its growth.”

    Crew joined Diageo in 2020 from Pepsi

    (PEP)    Co. She is the former CEO of tobacco company Reynolds American and has worked at Kraft Foods, Nestle

    (NSRGF)     and Mars.

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  • World Athletics regulations on transgender women athletes risk human rights violations, rights groups say | CNN

    World Athletics regulations on transgender women athletes risk human rights violations, rights groups say | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Trans rights advocates have warned sports governing bodies that “blanket bans” on transgender women from competing in women’s categories risk “violating fundamental human rights principles.”

    This follows World Athletics (WA) President Sebastian Coe’s announcement of new regulations around transgender women athletes on Thursday, which come into force on March 31 and prohibit athletes who have gone through what WA called “male puberty” from participating in female world rankings competitions. WA said the exclusion would apply to “male-to-female transgender athletes.”

    “Such policies risk violating international human rights principles of non-discrimination, which require such policies to start from a place of inclusion unless an exclusion can be justified as proportionate to any risks identified,” Anna Brown, CEO of Equality Australia, said in a statement.

    “World Athletics has failed to meet that standard.”

    Meanwhile, retired Australian transgender athlete Ricki Coughlan said she was “disappointed” by what she feels is a “fundamentally discriminatory” decision.

    “When leaders make decisions which divide and exclude us, we see this reflected in community,” Coughlan wrote on Twitter.

    “The voices of hate are amplified on one side and fear on the other. Our communities become divided and we miss the opportunity to achieve what we can only achieve when we come together, each of us working in a spirit where we can all strive to reach our full potentials.”

    Coe said the decision had been made to “maintain fairness for female athletes above all other considerations.”

    He explained that WA – the global governing body for track and field – would set up a working group to evaluate the issue of transgender inclusion over the next 12 months.

    “We’re not saying no forever,” Coe said.

    In a statement to CNN on Friday, WA said: “The science shows that anyone who has gone through male puberty retains male anatomical differences that provide an athletic advantage.

    “The World Athletics Council was unwilling to compromise the integrity of the female category without evidence that these male advantages can be ameliorated.

    “We currently do not have any transgender athletes in elite international competition; therefore, the time is right to consult more widely on this subject. We hope that any transgender athletes who are planning to enter our sport at an elite level come forward and contribute to our new Working Group.”

    In recent years, some opponents of trans women and girls’ participation in sport have turned the issue into a political flashpoint. In January, a small group of demonstrators gathered outside the NCAA Convention in San Antonio to protest the inclusion of transgender women athletes in women’s college sports.

    Advocates of banning transgender women from women’s sport have argued that transgender women have a physical advantage over cisgender women in sports.

    But the mainstream science does not support that conclusion. A 2017 report in the journal Sports Medicine that reviewed several related studies found “no direct or consistent research” on trans people having an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers, and critics say the bans add to the discrimination trans people face.

    Debate in the scientific community about whether androgenic hormones like testosterone serve as useful markers of athletic advantage remains ongoing.

    A World Athletics document obtained by CNN earlier this year states that trans women “retain an advantage in muscle mass, volume, and strength over cis women” after 12 months of gender affirming hormone therapy, while acknowledging that there is “limited existing experimental data” on the matter.

    The new policy follows similar regulations introduced by swimming governing body World Aquatics last year, which say that male-to-female transgender athletes will only be eligible to compete in the women’s categories in World Aquatics competitions if they transition before the age of 12 or before they reach stage two on the puberty Tanner Scale.

    Some athletes welcomed World Athletics’ decision, including British runner Emily Diamond, who called it “a big step for fairness and protecting the female category.”

    Writing on Twitter, Diamond added: “Hopefully this will be the rule across all levels now, not just elite ranking events.”

    Save Women’s Sport Australasia, a group campaigning against transgender athletes in women’s sport, also welcomed the move from WA.

    “It’s not a ban, it just actually moves to protect the female category to female competitors and it was an excellent decision,” spokeswoman Ro Edge told Reuters.

    “So it’s really reassuring to hear (WA) president Seb Coe come out and say they’ve got to maintain fairness of female participation above all other considerations.”

    Coe said the decision came after deliberation with groups including World Athletics member federations, the Global Athletics Coaches Academy and Athletes’ Commission and the IOC, as well as representative transgender and human rights groups.

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  • Bindi Irwin reveals 10-year battle with endometriosis on International Women’s Day | CNN

    Bindi Irwin reveals 10-year battle with endometriosis on International Women’s Day | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The Australian conservationist Bindi Irwin revealed Wednesday she has undergone surgery for endometriosis after a decade-long battle with the condition that affects the uterus.

    “For 10 years I’ve struggled with insurmountable fatigue, pain and nausea,” Irwin shared in posts on social media alongside an image of her in a hospital bed.

    “A doctor told me it was simply something you deal with as a woman and I gave up entirely, trying to function through the pain.”

    Irwin’s posts coincided with both International Women’s Day and Endometriosis Awareness Month.

    Endometriosis is “a condition in which the tissue that normally lines the uterus grows outside the uterus,” according to the United States’ National Institutes of Health.

    Symptoms can include pelvic pain, heavy bleeding during periods and fertility issues.

    Irwin, 24, said doctors had found 37 lesions, some of which were “very deep and difficult to remove,” but she was now “on the road to recovery.”

    “I’m sharing my story for anyone who reads this and is quietly dealing with pain and no answers. Let this be your validation that your pain is real and you deserve help,” she added.

    Anyone with a uterus who is of reproductive age can suffer from the disease but it’s most common among women in their 30s and 40s. Approximately one in 10 people born with a uterus has endometriosis, according to the World Health Organization. The disease affects around 190 million women and girls globally.

    Irwin is a celebrity conservationist who has starred in “Crikey! It’s the Irwins,” a reality TV show that chronicles her family’s work at the Australia Zoo in Queensland, which her mother owns.

    She won “Dancing With the Stars” in 2015 and comes from a family of conservationists that includes her father Steve, the late ‘Crocodile Hunter’ who was killed by a stingray while filming in the Gerat Barrier Reef in 2006.

    She gave birth to a daughter, Grace, in March 2021.

    “Please be gentle and pause before asking me (or any woman) when we’ll be having more children,” Irwin wrote in her post Wednesday. “After all that my body has gone through, I feel tremendously grateful that we have our gorgeous daughter. She feels like our family’s miracle.”

    Soon after her posts, her family took to social media to share their support.

    Her husband Chandler Powell said, “Seeing how you pushed through the pain to take care of our family and continue our conservation work while being absolutely riddled with endometriosis is something that will inspire me forever.”

    Irwin’s brother Robert added on Instagram that, “You never know who’s suffering in silence, let’s make this a topic that we all freely talk about.”

    Irwin is the latest in a series of celebrities to have opened up about their struggles with endometriosis.

    In a Paramount Plus docuseries released last year, comedian Amy Schumer discussed her decades-long battle with what she called a “lonely disease.” Schumer had her uterus removed in 2021 and shared video on her Instagram following the surgery.

    Comedian Lena Dunham and actress Padma Lakshmi have also been vocal about their experiences with the disease.

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  • Woman in custody after hourslong standoff that followed the shooting of three officers, authorities say | CNN

    Woman in custody after hourslong standoff that followed the shooting of three officers, authorities say | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Authorities say an hourslong standoff at a Missouri home that followed the shooting of three officers is over and a woman found in the house was taken into custody.

    A deceased man was also found in the home, according to state authorities.

    The three Kansas City, Missouri, police officers were hospitalized after being shot while executing a search warrant Tuesday night, Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said.

    Authorities have not said who fired the shots that injured the officers.

    The officers’ injuries were not life-threatening and they were able to talk from their hospital beds, Graves said.

    “That’s the best situation under these circumstances that I could hope for,” the chief said. “That our officers are alert, they’re awake and they’re talking.”

    The officers were part of a tactical response team executing the warrant at a home shortly after 9:30 p.m. local time, Graves said. Graves did not provide details about the investigation or the warrant.

    Police knocked and identified themselves and were met with gunfire when they tried to breach the door, she said.

    Officers returned fire, but it is unclear how many shots they fired or if they hit the gunman or anyone else in the home, the chief said.

    What followed was a standoff around the home that lasted for hours and involved the help of at least one other Missouri police department as well as the state’s highway patrol.

    SWAT members from the Missouri State Highway Patrol arrived on scene early Wednesday morning, the agency said on Twitter.

    The highway patrol’s SWAT team, with help from FBI SWAT members, secured the house Wednesday evening, it said.

    “A male was found deceased & a female was located alive with no injuries. She is in police custody,” the highway patrol said.

    Authorities have not said how the man died and it was unclear as of Wednesday night who fired at the three Kansas City officers.

    Investigators were continuing to process the scene Wednesday night and the probe is ongoing.

    Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said in a tweet late Tuesday night he was praying for the officers injured.

    “We’ve been reminded too much lately in Kansas City how dangerous police work can be,” he said. “I am praying for a full recovery for our three officers injured this evening and that everyone on duty gets home to their families safely.”

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  • The US gender pay gap: Why it hasn’t narrowed much in 20 years | CNN Business

    The US gender pay gap: Why it hasn’t narrowed much in 20 years | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    A lot can change in two decades. Or… not.

    In 2022, US women on average earned about 82 cents for every dollar a man earned, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers.

    That’s a big leap from the 65 cents that women were earning in 1982. But it has barely moved from the 80 cents they were earning in 2002.

    “Higher education, a shift to higher-paying occupations and more labor market experience have helped women narrow the gender pay gap since 1982,” the Pew analysis noted. “But even as women have continued to outpace men in educational attainment, the pay gap has been stuck in a holding pattern since 2002, ranging from 80 to 85 cents to the dollar.”

    Before getting to potential reasons why the pay gap hasn’t narrowed for two decades — let alone disappeared — it’s worth noting that the top-line average doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s been going on for women in different cohorts.

    Take age: Women between the ages of 25 and 34 are much closer to achieving pay parity with men than they are likely to be when they get older.

    Since 2007, younger women have been earning about 90 cents on the dollar, according to Pew: “But even as pay parity might appear in reach for women at the start of their careers, the wage gap tends to increase as they age.”

    Having children is a factor, Pew found. For example, parenthood leads some women to put their careers on hold, or put in a shorter workweek. For employed fathers between the ages 35 and 44, having children at home is a time that often coincides with receiving higher pay even though the pay of employed mothers that same age is unaffected.

    “In 2022, mothers ages 25 to 34 earned 85% as much as fathers that age, but women without children at home earned 97% as much as fathers. In contrast, employed women ages 35 to 44 — with or without children — both earned about 80% as much as fathers,” the report said.

    Or take race and ethnicity: Pew found that Black women last year earned just 70% as much as White men. Hispanic women earned 65% as much. For White women, the gap was less, at 83%. Asian women were closest to parity, at 93%.

    “To some extent, the gender wage gap varies by race and ethnicity because of differences in education, experience, occupation and other factors that drive the gender wage gap for women overall,” the Pew analysis noted.

    “But researchers have uncovered new evidence of hiring discrimination against various racial and ethnic groups, along with discrimination against other groups, such as LGBTQ and disabled workers,” the report continued. “Discrimination in hiring may feed into differences in earnings by shutting out workers from opportunities,”

    Lastly, consider occupation: Women are still overrepresented in lower-paying occupations such as personal care and service jobs; and underrepresented in higher-paying ones, like managerial and STEM jobs.

    Regardless, the gender pay gap is typically narrowest when you pick any single occupation and control for measurable factors between men and women like education, tenure and hours worked.

    “But it never goes away,” said Rakesh Kochhar, a Pew senior researcher.

    The persistence of a gap over the past 20 years, even when comparing apples to apples, suggests there are other factors at play.

    These can include potential discrimination. When Pew asked Americans in October what factors they believed played a role in the gender wage gap, half indicated a major reason is that employers treat women differently. Women were much more likely than men (61% vs 37%) to cite this as a major reason.

    Another factor that may help explain the stickiness of the pay gap is that the wage premium for those with college degrees has grown smaller. So while more employed women (48%) now have at least a bachelor’s degree than men (41%), it is worth less.

    Individual choices such as taking periods away from the workforce to care for children also continue to play a role. Those choices may be borne of cultural norms, societal issues such as a lack of affordable child care, or personal preference.

    Narrowing the gender pay gap from here may be tough sledding.

    “More sustained progress in closing the pay gap may depend on deeper changes in societal and cultural norms and in workplace flexibility that affect how men and women balance their careers and family lives,” Pew researchers suggested.

    And even then, progress may be slower than desired, since, as they noted, “even in countries that have taken the lead in implementing family-friendly policies, such as Denmark, parenthood continues to drive a significant wedge in the earnings of men and women.”

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  • Opinion: Gymnastics teams look nothing like they used to. And this is the biggest change of all | CNN

    Opinion: Gymnastics teams look nothing like they used to. And this is the biggest change of all | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Onnie Willis Rogers is a former collegiate gymnastics champion at UCLA and a professor of psychology at Northwestern University whose research focuses on human development, diversity and equity and education. The opinions expressed here are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    I’m one of just five Black women in history to win the NCAA individual all-around title in gymnastics. It was a tremendous accomplishment which, when I won it two decades ago, left me elated.

    But it was a particular kind of joy, tinged with the frustration often felt by the Black athlete who excels in a sport where they are one of only a very few.

    I grew up in the sport in the 1980s. I took my first gymnastics class at the age of 3 and finished my final competition at the age of 22. Throughout all of my years training in the sport, I was often the lone brown face in a gym filled with tumbling, somersaulting, hand-standing kids.

    Before accepting a full ride sports scholarship to UCLA, I was an elite gymnast, a member of the National Team for USA Gymnastics (USAG). As a Black gymnast growing up, being one of few was normal. And as I progressed up the ranks, the sport seemed only to get whiter.

    Even during my four years at UCLA, an urban school with a sizable Black population, I was the only Black female gymnast on my team. In 2001, the year I won my NCAA title, I could probably count the other Black women gymnasts at top-ranked schools we competed against on one hand.

    But I’ve noticed something different about gymnasts today, and perhaps you have, as well. There are more Black and brown athletes in the sport than ever before. And they are turning out to be a force to be reckoned with.

    This year marks 20 years since my last gymnastics competition, and a lot has changed in the sport — but perhaps nothing so much as the dramatic increase in racial and ethnic diversity. The change has been nothing short of astonishing — especially at last summer’s stunning National Championships, when African American women swept the podium.

    I’d been involved in gymnastics my entire life, and I never saw it coming. The diversity — and the excellence — exhibited by the top-performing women of color in the sport has been something to behold.

    There’s Simone Biles who, of course, needs no introduction. She’s a global icon who has earned seven Olympic medals and 25 world championship medals — more than anyone else in gymnastics — and is regarded as the GOAT in our sport. Some have even argued that she is the greatest athlete of all time, period. Before Biles, there was Gabby Douglas, who was crowned the 2012 Olympic all-around champion, becoming the first Black gymnast to capture that title.

    To be honest, it’s hard to name all the women of color who have made it to the top ranks of the sport since I stopped competing. Laurie Hernandez, who is Puerto Rican, was the youngest gymnast to earn gold in Rio 2016. Jordan Chiles helped Team USA secure the gold at last year’s world championships. And there’s Sunisa Lee, a Hmong American who became the first Asian American to win the Olympic all-around title. The list goes on and on.

    The standouts of color at the collegiate level have been no less impressive. Florida Gator Trinity Thomas holds a breathtaking record of perfection. UCLA’s Chae Campbell, Chiles and freshman standout Selena Harris continue to grab headlines in our sport, as does Jordan Rucker of the University of Utah and Haleigh Bryant of Louisiana State University — and, astonishingly, too many others to name.

    These women of color are setting new records and breaking the internet with performances of exceptional style and athleticism. I can’t think of another major sport that has seen its ranks change so dramatically. Swimming? Golf? Tennis? No, not really. These predominantly White sports have seen a relative few breakthrough athletes of color, but overall the complexion of the sports haven’t changed much.

    Over the years, structural racism has powerfully shaped access, opportunity and identity — all of which help explain why gymnastics was so White in the first place. The long arm of economic inequality touches every facet of life, including sport.

    Sports where Black people have been represented have traditionally been those accessible through schools, such as football, basketball and track and field. Gymnastics is a very expensive sport, costing thousands of dollars and requiring long, intense training hours. High-quality instruction is only accessible in private clubs and at elite training facilities that are few and far between. Growing up, my family fundraised furiously, did extra jobs at my gymnastics club, and housed visiting gymnasts to offset the unreachable high cost of tuition.

    There is no magic that has “created” gymnasts of color in the past decade. There have always been strong, talented Black and brown girls capable of excelling in the sport. Many of the first Black women in the sport, like Diane Dunham and Wendy Hilliard, simply were not acknowledged because our society has for so long refused to value or validate Black women. Instead, the sport favored a Nadia Comaneci-style waif, thin and childlike. That doubtless kept a lot of women who looked like me on the sidelines. Elite gymnastics did not always see them or make space for them.

    Luckily for me, there were always exceptions, and these women became my inspirations. Betty Okino and Dominique Dawes were the trailblazers in my day. I watched them represent Team USA with their brown bodies and Black girl hair and I knew it was a little more possible for me.

    I vividly remember being 16 years old laying belly down on the green shag carpet in my living room in Tacoma, Washington, captivated as UCLA — and even more significantly for me, Stella Umeh — clinched its first-ever NCAA Title.

    On the floor, Umeh was Black, full-bodied and fierce; her hair was a close shave; the music for her floor routine was rhythmic and pulsating. She was unlike any gymnast I had ever seen. I attended UCLA after Umeh had graduated, but walked confidently and fully in her footsteps, not simply because she too was a Black woman, but because she remade the mold.

    Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the NCAA Metroplex Challenge gymnastics competition with my 11-year-old daughter and her gymnastics team. There were multiple Black gymnasts competing for every school on the floor.

    As a developmental psychologist who studies youth identity development, I couldn’t ignore the significance of the moment. I couldn’t fail to register the awe in their eyes as they watched their possible future selves from their front row seats, a real image of who they may become. In short, identity and representation matter. How many Black girls even enter the sport in the future will be influenced by what they see as attainable or impossible.

    Meanwhile, the breakthroughs in gymnastics just keep coming: This year, Fisk University is the first HBCU to have an NCAA gymnastics team — an entire team of Black and brown girls doing gymnastics. It’s radical. It’s transformative. And as Black History Month draws to a close, it’s a reminder of what is possible.

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  • What is doxxing? | CNN

    What is doxxing? | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: This story is part of ‘Systems Error’, a series by CNN As Equals, investigating how your gender shapes your life online. For information about how CNN As Equals is funded and more, check out our FAQs.



    CNN
     — 

    In 2017, Kyle Quinn enjoyed the anonymity any engineering professor typically would until he became a target of doxxing. Angry social media users mistakenly identified him as having attended a White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. His pictures, home address and employer’s name quickly made rounds across social networks, frightening Quinn and his wife and sending them to a colleague’s home for refuge, the New York Times reported.

    Quinn is one of many victims of doxxing, a form of online invasion of personal privacy that can lead to devastating consequences.

    According to the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, doxxing is the intentional revelation of a person’s private information online without their consent, often with malicious intent. This includes the sharing of phone numbers, home addresses, identification numbers and essentially any sensitive and previously private information such as personal photos that could make the victim identifiable and potentially exposed to further harassment, humiliation and real-life threats including stalking and unwanted encounters in person.

    There are multiple etymologies for the term, but the cybersecurity firm Kapersky reports that one explanation is that doxxing came from the phrase ”dropping documents” and gradually ”documents” became ”dox” which has been used as a verb to refer to the practice. Originally a form of online attack used by hackers, the firm wrote, doxxing has been around since the 1990s.

    Doxxing can happen in many ways online and on other platforms.

    According to the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, in 2014, the gaming industry experienced a watershed moment known as Gamergate, a year-long culture war led by far right trolls online. After Eron Gjoni, ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn uploaded a blog post about their break up, accused her of cheating on him, and shared screenshots of their private communications on an online forum, Quinn became one of many gamers to be a high-profile target of doxxing and rape threats, followed by many other female game developers who raised their voices, according to The Guardian.

    One of the victims, the American game developer Brianna Wu wrote in the magazine Index on Censorship: ”The truth is there is no free speech when speaking about your experiences leads to death threats, doxxing and having armed police sent to your house.”

    In 2014, Wu tweeted about escaping her home out of fear for her safety along with screenshots of death threats sent to her account.

    In 2019, the South African journalist and broadcaster Karima Brown missent a message meant for her producer to a WhatsApp group run by the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party in which journalists are able to get media statements from the EFF, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ). Julius Malema, the party leader, accused her of spying on the party, and reacted by tweeting her phone number to his 2.3 million followers. Brown reportedly received rape and murder threats, including graphic messages 7]. The high court in Johannesburg later ruled the doxxing was a violation of the country’s Electoral Act, according to the CPJ, with Brown telling the non-profit that the court’s ruling was “a victory for democracy and media freedom, and a blow against misogyny and toxic masculinity.”

    Facebook’s parent company Meta does not explicitly use the term ”doxxing” in its privacy violations policy, but said in a statement to CNN that it considers users sharing ”personally identifiable information” about others a violation of its community standards. The company says it reviews any piece of content against its community standards and may remove private information such as home addresses that could result in tangible harm unless this information is publicly available through news coverage, press releases or other sources. Facebook users can use a specific reporting channel when they are concerned about their image privacy on the platform.

    TikTok clearly defines doxxing in its community guidelines which ban both the collection and publication of individuals’ personal information for malicious intent. Users can report a specific item on the platform and follow the instructions.

    Twitter’s app and desktop versions allow you to report other users who tweet private information and media about themselves or somebody else without permission by clicking on the three dots in the corner of an offending tweet, then Report Tweet and following the instructions. Users found in violation of the policy are required to remove the content in question and temporarily locked out of their account. Twitter says permanent suspension may result from a second violation. Users can also file a separate form to report such violations.

    It depends on the jurisdiction. In Asia, Singapore outlawed most forms of intentional harassment or distress in 2014, which includes doxxing, and violators can be fined up to SGD $5,000 (nearly $3,800 US) and/or jailed for up to 6 months.

    In Indonesia, activists told CNN that doxxing cases have been on the rise, especially those targeting women human rights defenders and journalists. Damar Juniarto, the executive director of Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network, a network of digital rights activists, said the term doxxing ”is not known in the Indonesia legal system” causing some doxxing cases to not be taken seriously by police. But he explained that the Personal Data Protection law, passed in September, punishes people who use and share personal information without a person’s consent, which can include doxxing.

    In the UK, there are clear guidelines for prosecutors to handle cases, particularly cases of violence against women and girls, which involve threats to post personal information on social media and the disclosure of private sexual images without consent, and the punishments vary.

    In the US, measures to combat doxxing vary across states. Last year, Nevada passed a bill that bans doxxing and allows victims to bring a civil action against the perpetrators. In California, cyber harassment including doxxing with the intent to put others and their immediate family in danger can put violators in county jail for up to one year or impose a fine of up to $1,000, or both.

    In 2021, Hong Kong authorities amended the data privacy law to include doxxing, with people facing jail sentences of up to five years and fines of up to HK$1 million ($129,000 US). This followed the doxxing of many officials and police officers during the 2019 protests against the Hong Kong government’s proposed bill to allow extraditions to mainland China. Critics argued that doxxing can be legally defended if sharing information about government officials out of public interest.

    Lauren Krapf, the technology policy and advocacy counsel for the Anti-Defamation League in the US, said whether doxxing is criminal depends on the intent.

    ”I think in certain circumstances, it is probably appropriate that [doxxers] have some level of criminal liability or civil liability,” Krapf told CNN, but emphasized that doxxing is not a black and white situation. The activity itself can be an empowerment tool for people engaging in protests to share information about extremists to others, she explained.

    Across the US, “state laws vary greatly and there is no federal statute outlawing doxxing,” Krapf told CNN, meaning “there isn’t currently one specific standard codified.”

    While anyone can be doxxed, experts believe women are more likely to be targets of mass online attacks, leaks of their sensitive media, such as sexually explicit imagery that was stolen or shared without consent and unsolicited and sexualized messages.

    A 2020 report by UN Women focusing on India, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, and South Korea found that women experience many forms of online violence simultaneously such as trolling, doxxing and social media hacks.

    A 2020 global report by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), found that online violence against women is startlingly prevalent in the 51 countries surveyed, with 45% of Generation Z and Millennial women reporting being affected, compared to 31% of Generation X women and Baby Boomers, while 85% of women surveyed overall report witnessing online violence against women. While online violence is alarmingly common globally, the study shows significant regional differences, with Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East showing at least 90% of women surveyed having been affected.

    While the responsibility to prevent doxxing rests with those who would violate another’s privacy, and not with the victim, it is useful to take some preventative steps to protect yourself online.

    It can help to be familiar with doxxing-related policies on the online platforms you use as well as how to report abuse more generally. Consider making it harder for people to track you online by restricting the accessibility of any information that can identify you online and offline. For example, check who can see your personal email, phone number, home addresses and other physical locations on your social media accounts.

    The University of Berkeley, PEN America and Artist at Risk Connection provide thorough online privacy guides.

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