Ivana Trump’s staff later called the paper to say Mr. Trump was, in fact, a feminist, before calling again to say he was not — and then calling a final time to say he was, indeed, a feminist.
.. Katie Packer, the founder of an anti-Trump super PAC and the co-founder of Burning Glass, a firm that helps Republican candidates convey a conservative message to women, said it would take more than an appearance by Mr. Trump’s wife to help him attract female supporters.
“You don’t get special credit because your wife likes you,” Ms. Packer said. “The rub on this guy that is commonly accepted now is that he’s a sexist and a racist, and this isn’t going to be fixed because he has one black guy who speaks ahead of him at a rally or because his wife comes out on the campaign trail.”
Top Female Players Accuse U.S. Soccer of Wage Discrimination
A men’s player, for example, receives $5,000 for a loss in a friendly match but as much as $17,625 for a win against a top opponent. A women’s player receives $1,350 for a similar match, but only if the United States wins; women’s players receive no bonuses for losses or ties.
.. In response to the complaint filed Wednesday, U.S. Soccer argued that not only was the players’ pay collectively bargained, but that the players had insisted more than once on a salary-based system as a means of economic security over the bonus-centric plan the men work under. Russell Sauer, the outside counsel for the federation during labor talks, also said the women’s labor contract included provisions — severance and injury pay, health benefits and maternity leave, for example — not available to the men’s team.
Trump, Truth and Abortion
In reality, the anti-abortion movement is grounded on the idea that sex outside of marriage is a sin, and the only choice a woman should have is between abstinence and the possibility of imminent parenthood. It may be politically unwise to say that the sinner ought to pay, but she should at minimum have to carry an unwanted child to term.
Look at it this way and it’s easy to understand why abortion opponents have shown virtually no interest in working to make contraceptives and family planning universally available. It’s the sex, at bottom, that they oppose
.. It was a little like the moment at the Washington Post editorial board interview when he was being pressed on whether he’d use tactical nuclear weapons against ISIS and responded: “I’ll tell you one thing. This is a very good looking group of people here. Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?”
.. There was, however, one moment of shining clarity. It came when he was asked whether the man who created an unwanted pregnancy should be punished, too.
“I would say no,” Trump quickly decreed.
Why Do So Many Digital Assistants Have Feminine Names?
Hey Cortana. Hey Siri. Hey girl.
The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles—and that the makers of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations. But maybe there’s more to it.
“It’s much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” the Stanford communications professor Clifford Nass, told CNNin 2011. (Nass died in 2013.) “It’s a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.”
Which sounds nice, but doesn’t necessarily hold up to cultural scrutiny. Just ask any woman who works in radio about how much unsolicited criticism she receives about the way she talks.
.. It’s been widely reported that the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs didn’t like the name Siri, but that no one at Apple could agree on anything better. (Perhaps I should note here that Siri doesn’t always default to a female-sounding voice; if you switch Siri’s language to United Kingdom English, for instance, it switches to male.)
.. Google’s digital assistant doesn’t have a woman’s name, or even a human’s name, but OK Google, as it’s called, does have a female voice—and a voice that was recently upgraded to sound more human-like.
.. “As we start to see these intelligent agents,” Mortensen told me, “the first question we have to ask is: Do we choose to humanize it?
.. The funny thing is, some of the world’s most powerful and destructive technologies have been given female names, too. Humans have oftenbestowed deadly weapons with female names—like the Big Bertha howitzer and the Mons Meg cannon. It has been suggested, as I’ve written in the past, that perhaps this is an example of the objectification of women taken to its logical extension.