Women quotas are 'demeaning', says Latvian ex-president (Europe)

The EU commission's idea of imposing quotas on women in businesses is based on the "demeaning" principle that no woman can make it on her own merits, says former Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga. "What does it actually mean to have quotas? It's to say we don't have enough competent or interested women to do a certain job," Ms Vike-Freiberga told the EUobserver on Tuesday (8 March) on the margins of a gender equality workshop organised by the Norwegian funding scheme for eastern European countries - EEA/Norway Grants.

95% of abuse of juvenile inmates perpetrated by females (USA)

The January 2010 report from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics titled "Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth," found that 95% of children reporting sexual misconduct by juvenile corrections staff reported it was perpetrated by a female correctional officer, even though there are more male correctional officers than female correctional officers in juvenile correctional facilities. Of course, that may be due, in part, to the fact that male children are much more likely to be incarcerated for their offences than female children are. Even so, the report goes on to say that 10.8% of male juvenile inmates in the U.S. reported sexual misconduct on the part of facility staff, as compared to only 4.7% of the female juvenile inmate population. That means that your odds of being sexually molested in a juvenile correctional facility are twice as high if you are a boy than if you are a girl.

Women's 'double shift' of work and domestic duties a myth finds new research (UK)

Feminists are wrong to claim that men should do a larger share of the housework and childcare because on average, men and women already do the same number of hours of productive work. In fact, if we consider the hours spent doing both paid work and unpaid household, care and voluntary work together, men already do more than their fair share, argues LSE sociologist Catherine Hakim in a special issue of Renewal: a journal of social democracy. Until recently, unpaid work such as childcare and domestic work has been hard to quantify and so mostly ignored by social scientists and policy makers. The development of Time Use Surveys across the European Union, however, has provided data on exactly how much time we spend carrying out both paid and unpaid productive activities. The findings show that on average women and men across Europe do the same total number of productive work hours once paid jobs and unpaid household duties are added together - roughly eight hours a day. Catherine Hakim said: ‘We now have a much more specific and accurate portrait of how families and individuals divide their “work” and this data overturns the well-entrenched theory that women work disproportional long hours in jobs and at home in juggling family and work. Feminists constantly complain that men are not doing their fair share of domestic work. The reality is that most men already do more than their fair share.’