The hard-won triumphs of the Brontës are the subject of a new Masterpiece drama.
it is the struggle to survive, not literary ambition—though that ambition is a strong one—that takes precedence in the lives of these sisters... father distinctly more concerned with his only son, Branwell (Adam Nagaitis) than with the doings of his dutiful daughters... Their ultimate triumph arrives with the emergence of their actual identities after writing wildly successful works, all under male-sounding pseudonyms... Charlotte gave when asked why she liked to write anonymously. If offered one gift by a good fairy it would be, “Grant me the power to walk invisible.”
‘Is that not correct?’: Male GOP lawmaker asks why men should pay for prenatal coverage
The law also required plans to cover pregnancy and childbirth. That’s where the fireworks started in the Energy and Commerce Committee.
“What mandate in the Obamacare bill does he take issue with?” Doyle asked Shimkus, using the formal parlance of congressional committees.
“What about men having to purchase prenatal care?” Shimkus said.
At that point, one could hear the room start to stir.
“I’m just . . . is that not correct?” Shimkus said. “And should they?”
.. “Do men not have to buy maternity coverage?” Ellmers said, referring to the health-care law’s essential health benefits. “To the best of your knowledge, has a man ever delivered a baby?”
Here’s how insurance expert and columnist Nancy Metcalf answered a similar question from a Consumer Reports reader that year:
Health insurance, like all insurance, works by pooling risks. The healthy subsidize the sick, who could be somebody else this year and you next year. Those risks include any kind of health care a person might need from birth to death — prenatal care through hospice. No individual is likely to need all of it, but we will all need some of it eventually.
Women in Power: Novel Herland
In 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a funny but unsettling story called Herland. As the title hints, it’s a fantasy about a nation of women – and women only – that has existed for two thousand years in some remote, still unexplored part of the globe. A magnificent utopia: clean and tidy, collaborative, peaceful (even the cats have stopped killing the birds), brilliantly organised in everything from its sustainable agriculture and delicious food to its social services and education. And it all depends on one miraculous innovation. At the very beginning of its history, the founding mothers had somehow perfected the technique of parthenogenesis. The practical details are a bit unclear, but the women somehow just gave birth to baby girls, with no intervention from men at all. There was no sex in Herland.
Ask HN: How does diversity improve product development?
One of the recent emails said diversity improved products. I’ve racked my brains and can’t think of how this can be the case–on the whole.
I could understand having someone with cultural knowledge doing UX. But, say, a programmer? Does, for example, a Welsh person create better APIs by virtue of being Welsh? That doesn’t follow!
Good example.I think in general women take care of their health more than men. Women may well have been the main users of the app(?).Not having people who represent your main/large user groups does seem problematic.
I don’t think it calls for automatic diversity, still. Instead, a definite consideration of who is using the product.
I worked for Aflac for over five years. They have a good track record as an ethical company that treats employees really well, etc. They also have a good track record on diversity specifically.They always said something like We hire “everyone” because we sell to “everyone.” There are things you just will not think of if you are not part of a particular subgroup.The other thing I will suggest is that in order to have diversity internally, you need a certain level of general respect for people of a sort that fosters good communication. If your people are too similar, the odds are really good that there will be implicit bias showing in how you word things or whatever. This implicit bias will be something that seems innocuous to insiders. Most people are not very welcoming of hearing that the way they do things smacks of implicit bias. This feels really ugly to them, so it is incredibly hard to change such things. Even if someone is willing and able to point it out, most people will not only not listen, they will actively deny it. But if you have a lot of implicit bias, most people won’t even try to tell you that you are doing this Thing that excludes them and others like them.
I do blog a bit about such topics and would be happy to pull up a relevant post or two from my blog if you are interested. I have a track record of promoting diversity in online forums and I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member of HN.
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