Happy National Business Women’s Day!

There may still be a huge gender gap in the workforce, with even the women running Fortune 500 companies earning just 69 cents to every dollar earned by male CEOs. But women are proving to be major forces of change in virtually every industry, from international banking to non-profit organizations. These 10 women CEOs, including Eileen Fisher, Lauren Bush and Majora Carter, are promoting social and environmental responsibility within their companies and in the world at large.

On this National Business Women’s Day we salute them!

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, Green for All

CEO of anti-poverty organization Green for All, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is also a sustainability advocate who has been named among the 100 most powerful people in California’s Silicon Valley. Green for All provides green jobs training for low-income people and people of color, and helped push through a California provision that guarantees local workers access to energy-efficiency and renewable energy projects. Before she came to Green for All in 2009, Ellis-Lamkins was the Executive Officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council and Executive Director of Working Partnerships USA, which works to address economic disparities in Silicon Valley.

Kim Jordan, New Belgium Brewing

Along with her husband Jeff Lebesch, Kim Jordan co-founded one of America’s most successful craft breweries, New Belgium. Now the company’s CEO, Jordan was instrumental not only in bringing the company from a tiny two-person operation to selling beer in 26 states, but also in making New Belgium truly sustainable. The brewing company is 100% wind-powered and employee-owned, with a sustainability team visiting each department on a regular basis to make sure operations are as green as possible.

Through smart cuts to waste, energy and water usage, New Belgium has become a leading example of how breweries can take a sustainable route to profitability. The company is about to open a new brewery in Asheville, North Carolina, where it will revitalize an industrial brownfield and create new parks and greenways.

Eileen Fisher, Eileen Fisher Sustainable Apparel

The name Eileen Fisher is associated with timeless elegance, high quality and eco-friendly fabrics like organic and Fair Trade cotton, hemp and bamboo. As CEO of her eponymous brand, Eileen Fisher has committed to environmentally and socially conscious fashion, creating sophisticated garments that can last a lifetime. Many of Fisher’s garments are hand-sewn at a family-owned facility in New York City with a seamless process that reduces waste and creates a more durable product. The company even takes back used garments to either repair and resell, or recycle into other items like rugs and blankets.

Irene Rosenfeld, Kraft

Kraft Foods isn’t exactly known for being sustainable, more closely associated with industrial ‘cheez food’ products that barely resemble actual food. But Irene Rosenfeld is trying to change that. The Kraft CEO has dedicated a vast amount of resources and time to overhaul the company’s strategies, setting aggressive sustainability goals that have resulted in massive reductions in packaging waste, water consumption, energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. Kraft is also the world’s largest buyer of coffee and cocoa from Rainforest Alliance-certified farms. While the changes may be slow, they’re certainly notable.

Lauren Bush, FEED

Ducking out of her family’s historical involvement in politics, Texan Lauren Bush (now Lauren Lauren, after marrying the son of fashion designer Ralph) has dedicated her life and career to feeding the hungry. She co-founded FEED after becoming the UN World Food Program’s 2004 Honorary Spokesperson and is now CEO and Creative Director. FEED seeks to create products that can help bring food to impoverished people across the globe. The purchase of one FEED reusable shopping bag can feed one child in school for one year.

Gail Kelly, Westpac Bank

Can big banks be sustainable, too? Gail Kelly, CEO of Australia’s Westpac Bank, believes so, and has pushed sustainability as a business strategy in this seemingly unlikely industry. Under her leadership, Westpac rose to #14 on the Corporate Knights Top 100 Most Sustainable Companies  in 2011. Kelly has advocated for unprecedented transparency in Westpac’s operations and its sustainability report reveals such small details as CO2 emissions per employee. Westpac Bank also has 37.5% women in positions of leadership, which is unusual for such big companies, let alone banking institutions.

Alexa Von Tobel, LearnVest

28-year-old Alexa Von Tobel started LearnVest in 2008 to teach women how to be financially independent. Since then, the company has been valued at $100 million and expanded to offer affordable financial advice to clients ranging from those extremely in debt to people with a net worth that reaches 8 figures. Von Tobel got the idea while at Harvard Business School, taking a leave of absence to follow her dream. According to LearnVest, the company has helped over one million women gain control of their finances to date.

Majora Carter, Majora Carter Group

The founder of Sustainable South Bronx (SSBX), a non-profit organization that works to address economic and environmental issues through green job training, Majora Carter is now CEO of her own economic planning and consulting group. Known as one of America’s top environmental justice advocates, Carter’s motto is “Green the Ghetto!” and her current work with the Majora Carter Group brings her SSBX approach outside the South Bronx. The Majora Carter Group “uses the green economy and green economic tools to unlock the potential of every place – urban, rural and everywhere in between.”

Denise Bode, American Wind Energy Association

Denise Bode is the CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, the national trade organization for the United States wind energy industry. A nationally recognized energy policy expert, Bode was once the president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, but now heads up lobbying efforts to get funding for wind energy projects. She has also served as CEO of the American Clean Skies Foundation, and was named among Washingtonian’s “100 Most Powerful Women of Washington” in 2011.

Maria Eitel, Nike Foundation

After sportswear giant Nike got caught violating worker rights in outsourced factories around the world in 1998, Maria Eitel came on board to help turn things around. The CEO of the Nike Foundation and vice president of Nike, Inc. works to bring economic opportunities to the world’s most impoverished girls, focusing on 250 million girls aged 10-19 in the developing world. Eitel turned the Nike Foundation from a passive group lacking any real budget or organization into a force for change committed to gender equality. Initiatives that have been created under her leadership include efforts to keep girls in school in Zambia, to avoid early marriage in Ethiopia, and to build rural learning centers in Bangladesh.

Images: wikimedia commons, new belgium brewing, eileenfisher.com, wikimedia commons, feedprojects.com, westpac, learnvest.com, majora carter group, awea.org, unicef.org

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No War on Women? Here are 13 bills and laws that say otherwise, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

In 1912, women all over the United States marched for their right to vote. In 2012, we’re marching against state and federal laws that restrict our freedom to make decisions about our own bodies, make it easy for abusers to get away with physically assaulting us and fail to grant us the equal pay that we deserve.

Why are we still fighting this hard 100 years later? Because efforts to keep us “in our place” haven’t stopped. The official Republican party line on the War on Women is that it isn’t happening. It’s all in our heads. But there are bills popping up all over the nation like the heads of a hydra that prove otherwise. Sometimes, the bills don’t pass. But when they don’t, those same legislators – or successors with the same ideals – are ready to try to ram them through again… and again… and again. Here are 13 of the most egregious examples.

1. GOP Attempts to Redefine Rape for the Purposes of Abortion Law

Was it “rape rape” or just “kinda rape” because House Republicans draw a distinction, claiming that “real rape” involves the use of force. All those other kinds of rape – as in date rape, statutory rape, rapes of women with limited mental capacity or any sexual assault in which a woman is not fully conscious – don’t count as reasons to get an abortion using federal funds in the GOP’s “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.” The House Republican Majority really, seriously tried to redefine rape to rule out federal assistance for abortions in many cases. Mother Jones provides an example of how this could play out: say a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old man. It wasn’t forcible, but at 13, she can’t legally consent to sex – it’s rape, plain and simple. She wouldn’t qualify for Medicaid to pay for an abortion. The bill would also forbid using tax benefits to pay for abortions, so that girl’s parents wouldn’t be able to use money from a tax-exempt health savings account (HSA) to pay for the procedure, either.

The House GOP ultimately stripped this controversial language from the bill, but then used a committee report to claim that the bill would not allow funding for abortions in cases of statutory rape. The bill passed the House in May 2011, but is not expected to pass in the Senate, if it even comes up for a vote.

2. United States Violence Against Women Act Fails LGBT, Native Women

Democrats and Republicans in the United States Congress have at least been able to agree that women should be protected from abuse. But which women? That’s the question that has held up the Violence Against Women Act for months. In April, the Senate passed the Democrat version of the bill, which extends protection to LGBT, Native American and illegal immigrant women, all of whose complaints about violence often get overlooked. But House Republicans stripped these protections from their own version of the bill, and now the two branches of government are at an impasse. Republicans are actually claiming that protecting all women from violence is an election year stunt, singling out specific groups for special treatment.

3. United States House of Representatives Votes to Let Women Die

They called it the Protect Life Act, but the bill that was passed in November 2011 bans the use of federal funds to cover the costs of any health plan that covers abortion – even in life-threatening situations. This simple fact led opponents of the bill to give it the far more appropriate nickname of the “Let Women Die” bill. The bilk obtains a provision that would allow hospitals receiving federal subsidies to refuse to treat women seeking abortions, no matter the circumstances. During the House of Representatives floor debate, Rep. Jackie Speier of California described in detail her own painful experience, demonstrating why abortions should be covered. “I was pregnant, I was miscarrying, I was bleeding… if I had to go from one hospital to the next trying to find one emergency room that would take me in, who knows if I would even be here today.”

What makes this even more frustrating is the fact that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act already keeps public federal funds separate from the private funds that cover abortion. What this bill is attempting to do is prevent women from buying private health insurance that includes abortion coverage through a state health care exchange. The bill is unlikely to pass in the Senate however, and President Obama has said that he’ll veto it if it ever reaches his desk.

4. Arizona Outlaws Abortion After 20 Weeks

Well, if the United States Government doesn’t succeed in letting women die, then by golly, Arizona will do it for them, at least on a state-wide scale. Arizona’s federal court upheld the most extreme abortion ban in the country in July 2012, criminalizing virtually all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, forcing physicians to wait until women are actually dying before they can offer life-saving care. It even bans abortions in cases where the fetus will not survive after birth, prolonging agony by forcing parents to carry pregnancies to full term and then literally watch their babies die.

The law flouts a Supreme Court ruling that states can’t ban abortion before viability, the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, which is about 24 weeks gestation. And another problem is the fact that many severe fetal abnormalities and risks to a woman’s life don’t occur until beyond that point. Judge James Teilborg gave in to the totally non-scientific assertion that 20-week fetuses can feel pain, ignoring the obvious fact that women can feel pain, and plenty of it.

And here’s the bitter icing on the cake: the bill considers the starting point of pregnancy to begin on the first day of the mother’s last menstrual period, before life is even scientifically possible. That means women hitting the 20-week mark are actually only 18 weeks pregnant.

5. GOP Cuts Crucial Services for Low-Income Women and Children

House Republicans voted for a new budget that would drastically cut food, shelter and health care services for millions of struggling families, singling out low-income women in particular. $3.3 million would be cut from low-income programs over 10 years, which would lead to states dumping an estimated 14 million to 28 million people from Medicaid rosters. The bill, which Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney called “a bold and exciting effort,” would also either disqualify 8 million of the 47 million people in the food stamp program or cut the benefits for all of them, leading to a loss of about $90 worth of food per month for a family of four. Small victory for common sense: the bill was rejected by the Senate in May.

6. Repeated Attempts to Ban Federal Funding of Planned Parenthood

Whew. That didn’t pass, so everything is okay, right? Of course not. Congress is still battling against a women’s right to make decisions about her own health – including use of contraception, something that should be a complete non-issue in 21st century America. Republicans in Congress repeatedly attempt to defund or eliminate Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide low-cost health care to millions of low-income women around the world. Paternalistic religious imperatives to restrict abortion and birth control are having a very direct, real-life effect: women are being deprived of cancer screenings, AIDS/HIV testing, family planning information and other education services that could reduce health care problems and prevent unplanned pregnancies from occurring in the first place. 76% of Planned Parenthood’s clients have incomes at or below 150% of the federal poverty level. And when Congress doesn’t succeed, states are ready to take up the cause in their stead.

7. South Dakota Forces Doctors to Claim that Abortion Increases Suicide Rates

In July, an appeals court upheld a South Dakota law that requires doctors to recite anti-abortion propaganda to patients seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Doctors are forced to tell women that abortions are linked to higher suicide rates – information that’s not based on reliable research. A 2008 John Hopkins review of the studies that claim the link between abortion and suicide concluded that even the highest quality studies on the subject showed no discernible differences in the mental health of women who’d had abortions and those who had not.

Women who want an abortion in South Dakota also face the longest waiting period in the nation (3 days), and are forced to undergo counseling at pregnancy centers that discourage abortions. But wait – it gets worse. South Dakota nearly made it legal to kill abortion doctors. State legislators sought to modify a “justifiable homicide” law to include killings that aimed to prevent harm to an unborn child, a provision that would have basically enabled people to murder abortion providers and get away with it. That bill was, thankfully, struck down.

8. Colorado Permits Private Businesses to Withhold Contraception

In Colorado, a small manufacturer of heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment decided that providing its employees with health insurance plans that cover contraception – as required by the Obama administration’s new healthcare laws – violated its religious liberty. As in, its “right” to discriminate against women in the name of the owners’ religion. Sounds like an outrageous request that goes against the United States Constitution, does it not? But a federal court in Colorado disagrees. An exception was made for this business, Hercules Industries, that could pave the way for employers all over the country to impose their religious views on their employees.

Hercules Industries, owned by Catholics, was granted a three-month temporary injunction allowing for further legal review of the case. Two similar lawsuits have been filed in Michigan and Missouri. The companies all claim that the law forces the owners to go against their religious beliefs forbidding the use of contraceptives. But as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) points out, this could pave the way for employers making decisions about health procedures like vaccinations and blood transfusions based on their own personal religious beliefs.

Mitt Romney, by the way, cheered for this ruling as well, in typically chilling privileged-conservative-male fashion. “Today’s injunction preventing the federal government from forcing one family business from having to choose between keeping its doors open and violating its faith is a step in the right direction. But it is only a step, not the end of the struggle. We must ensure that the same freedom to live according to one’s faith is available to all Americans.”

9. Wisconsin Equal Pay Enforcement Act Repealed

Think women don’t deserve to be paid less than men simply by virtue of being born female? Oh, you silly little lady (or radically feminized man, i.e. traitor). How wrong you are – according to Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who quietly repealed his state’s equal pay law in April 2012. The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act gave women more avenues through which to press charges against employers for gender-based pay discrimination. In Wisconsin, women earn 75 cents for every dollar that men make (compared to the national average of 77 cents, which obviously isn’t much better.) A bill to roll back the provision passed Republican-controlled chambers of the state government before Walker put his signature on it, without informing the public of his actions.

10. Senate Republicans Block Paycheck Fairness Act

On the federal level, an effort by Senate Democrats to strengthen the 45-year-old Equal Pay Act failed in June 2012. The Paycheck Fairness Act would have required employers to show that wage differences between the sexes are job-related, not gender-based. It would also protect women from retaliation from their employers when seeking equal pay. The bill was previously defeated in 2010 by solid Republican opposition.

11. Virginia Requires Invasive Vaginal Ultrasounds Before Abortion

So you want an abortion, citizen of Virginia? Well, we’re going to have to violate you with an unwanted, medically unnecessary vaginal ultrasound just to make sure. That’s the message that Virginia Republicans sent to women when they attempted to pass a law requiring transvaginal ultrasounds prior to obtaining an abortion, an amazing invasion of women’s bodies (literally) that aimed to shame them out of their decision. The state’s Republican Governor, Bob McDonnell, originally supported the measure, an ironic position given his squeamishness over TSA pat-downs in airports. Ultimately, he backed down – sort of. While women are still required to have an ultrasound procedure before an abortion, they can choose an abdominal ultrasound over the dildo-like transvaginal apparatus.

12. House GOP Tries to Block Abortions ‘Motivated by Racism or Sexism’

But wait, there’s more! Alabama and Pennsylvania are both considering similar ultrasound requirements, and the U.S. House GOP tried to pass a bill that would have allowed a woman’s spouse to obtain a court-ordered block against having an abortion by accusing her of wanting to end her pregnancy due to racism or sexism. Because all of those smug white guys in Congress are so concerned about sexism.

13. Alabama Personhood Bill Declares Fertilized Eggs to be People

So let’s get this straight: fertilized eggs, according to Alabama legislators, are people with rights. But women – over half the population of actual people in the world – are being stripped of their own rights in favor of bits of biological matter that are not, scientifically people. Alabama is actually just one of many states including Nevada, Oklahoma, Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Mississippi that have introduced bills attempting to define the start of human life. The Alabama bill defines life as beginning at the moment of conception, a concept that would not only make all abortion illegal even when the pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, but would also outlaw contraceptives like birth control pills and IUDs. This bill, along with another that would allow the state to opt out of providing health insurance for abortions under the new federal health care law, is currently stalled in committee. The personhood initiatives in most of the other states have failed, but classifying a fertilized egg as a person will be up for vote in Colorado in the November election.

Photo: ProgressOhio

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

No matter where you live, no matter how many life experiences you have, and no matter how much self-confidence you hold, there is nothing to stop certain men from treating you like a little girl. Blame it on some bizarre, existential threat that men – and at times, other women –  feel equality between the sexes will bring about, but it’s really pretty hard to wrap your brain around how the female gender is still, in 2012, frequently told to step down and be sweet.

In fact, we are told our writing is clearly female, our money decisions should still be dictated by our husbands, and those pat-downs? We should have worn a pants suit because blazers and trousers wouldn’t have provoked the assault. Sexist cliches: the ultimate comeback kid!

“The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles,” Scott Adams of the cartoon Dilbert writes.

I say suit up.

My first job out of college in 1996 was by far one of the more shining examples of sexual inequality.

Working in the city of Portland, Oregon, my ad-writing job was run by three tight-knit Mormon males just as side swept and Old-Spiced as Mitt. The nearly all-male office seemed harmless enough. The patriarch of the family would greet each one of us every morning in his 6’2″ splendor with a vitamin C tablet.

“Because who wants to get sick?” He’d say, laughing through his front teeth.

My colleague, Dan, and I would quickly spit out the tablet as soon as he passed (he waited for us to put it in our mouths) and keep on working, writing ads for truck stops and insurance companies all over the U.S. A few months into my job, I learned I was pregnant, and while everyone was elated (what Mormon family wouldn’t be with a woman bearing fruit?), from then on I was spoken to differently, handled differently.

And then the day.

Co-workers were feeling free to talk shop about pay and raises and time invested and that moment of finding out I was being paid $5.00 less per hour than all the men. The same men who went outside to smoke, who called their wives non-stop to argue, who sat and read magazines when no one was looking while I finished my work and helped whoever needed it – they were being paid more than I was. Furious, I sat there with a baby moving in my stomach, wondering if there was a hidden camera. Was I in a dream?

Dan said I should set a meeting up with the boss. Everyone believed I should be getting paid the same, if not more. And so I did, but the boss had me. Where else could I get a job in the next four months, already being five months along?

I was brought into his mammoth office, which was tricked out in John Wayne paintings, Cherokee warriors and boasting a desk covered in picture frames of kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, husband and wife shots, family shots, him with his two sons.

That toothy smile was bigger than ever and there was a huge bowl of plastic wrapped candy before me.

“Care for a candy, Amy?” Like we were both having a hard time. Like wasn’t being paid $5.00 less per hour kind of a bummer.

Nothing changed from that meeting, and my feelings about candy are now forever skewed.

It’s not a stretch to label yourself as a feminist these days and actually fit nicely in it, because sometimes even the people you think are smart and educated want to put you down. We’ve got the Republican presidential nominees telling us what to do with our bodies and whom we can marry – all the while, enjoying their own sex scandals. It feels a little too like The Handmaid’s Tale, and we are being trained for the Sons of Jacob.

Care for some candy, little girl?

I was talking with an author and fellow editor the other day and she said, “The climate of the country is always reflected by what women are doing.” She mentioned knitting, DIY, this need to be “grounded in something real.” I thought about all the knitting circles popping up all over the country under the guise of simple handwork, when we all know better.

Between the Lines is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country, between inner worlds and outer.

Image: 2timesm

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