Cody Unser photographed by Karen Kuehn

Starting in the traditional summer sphere of water sports, how can one not be inspired by the story of Cody Unser, who learned to scuba dive after being paralyzed from the chest down (by transverse myelitis) at the age of 12.   July’s issue of Readers’ Digest explains, “something clicked as she felt her body become weightless in the water.”  Now, at age 22, in addition to being a college student, she runs a foundation that helps other physically challenged folks have that experience.

Kimberly Anyadike

Moving from the water to the air, 15-year-old Kimberly Anyadike this summer became the youngest African-American female to fly across America.  Anyadike dedicated her quest to the Tuskegee Airmen of WWII.  The NY Daily News reported that when the director of the aeronautical museum where Anyadike learned to fly warned her that she would face a daunting task, she replied “Put it on.  I got big shoulders.”  Hat tip to Kaija for the information.

Barbara Mulford, photographed by Nick Iodice

While we’re in the sky, check out this entrepreneur who is building a business by capturing the energy of the summer sun.  After Barbara Mulford’s banking career fizzled, she enrolled in a local state college aiming toward a bachelor’s degree.  When she emerged she was an entrepreneur with a prize-winning business plan, reports the MetroWest Daily News.  Now her company, Watts Green, is up and running, selling and installing photovoltaic systems.

Gaelyn Olmstead

Coming back down to planet earth, among the most popular summer tourist destinations is the Grand Canyon.  One of the park rangers there, Gaelyn Olmstead, discovered her career after experiencing life as a wife, mom and craft business owner, and then returning to school for a BS in Environmental Education.  She told Adventurous Woman Blog that she first worked at Mount Saint Helens, where “they paid me to talk, something I’ve gotten in trouble for all of my life.  I was hooked.”

Brittany Pharr

Staying out west, summer is also the season for rodeos.  As of this writing, the leader in the leader in Women’s Professional Rodeo standings is Brittany Pozzi-Pharr, the 2007 Barrel Racing champion, who has earned over $100K in prize money this year.  Describing Pharr to the Houston Chronicle, her father said, “She’s a 95-pound ball of determination and always on the go.” Her husband said, “She is so mentally prepared; she has the ability to block out adversity.”

Hetty Fox, photographed by Tobdzic/CPL Media

From the wide-open west we cross the country to the confines of New York City, where Hetty Fox is spending the summer — as she has for the past 33 summers — providing safe play space for children on Lyman Place in the Bronx.  The New York Times reports that Fox “has made sure the cars are banished, the barricades are out and the basketball hoop, Nok Hockey table, checkerboard and assorted crafts are ready.”  One of the beneficiaries, seventeen-year-old Reginald Taylor, said, “As far as being able to have fun somewhere in the summer, this is it, so we cherish it.  It’s good to be around positive people.

Monica Ramirez

Finally, let’s not forget those  for whom summer is not a time of vacation, but of back-breaking labor:  farm workers.  Monica Ramirez works with the Southern Poverty Law Center to bring light to the widespread sexual harassment and assault of farmworker women.  In one project, women decorate bandannas that are displayed on line and exhibitions to raise awareness.  Ramirez says “These bandannas offer a message of hope and solidarity for women who often suffer in silence.”

I can’t claim to have used any objective criteria in compiling this list of the Girls of Summer.  These are simply the stories that caught my eye.  I’m sure there are many other candidates worthy of mention.  Readers, who would you nominate?

I had finished and was on my way out, when at the last minute I lifted one foot to pull up my knee-high hose.  Just then, the door swung open and another woman tried to enter.  Since I was standing on one foot, I couldn’t gracefully step aside.  So to break the awkwardness, I said, “Don’t you hate how you never know that the elastic in your knee-highs is shot until you’re already wearing them and they keep drooping down?” 

Now, I’ve had many such conversations in ladies’ rooms.  It’s partly because I’m from the South, where it’s culturally acceptable to strike up a chat with perfect strangers. But it’s also because I spent my career attending tradeshows and conferences in the laser, semiconductor, robotics, and factory automation fields.  When I was working these events (a decade and more ago now), women were still a rarity.  There was never pressure to rush in the ladies’ room, because there was never a line.

Back then, the other people in the ladies’ room were mostly “booth babes,” models hired to attract men into display booths.  I, on the other hand, attended the shows to talk technology with the engineers, and would never have been confused with a beauty.  In some ways, we ladies didn’t have a lot in common.  But in other ways, we shared much.  We shared being females just trying to earn a living however we could.  We shared being a minority among a majority that held a dominant, even vaguely threatening position.  And we shared the experience that the ladies’ room was a haven where we would take a deep breath before heading back out into the world where business was conducted.

But this time was different. The lady whose path I blocked while I pulled up my knee highs turned out to be there to attend the forum, and introduced herself as a prominent blogger whose work I knew.  And it turned out that she had seen the videos I’d made.  And then something happened that had never happened to me before.  Right there in the middle of the ladies room, we exchanged business cards.

I’ve exchanged business cards a hundred thousand times, but I’d never done it in the ladies’ room.  When I told the story to my husband, I cried.  It is so moving to me, after a career spent in a rather lonely minority position, to be working hand in hand with women (as well as men), and to be working together to benefit other women.  Please join us for the experience of a lifetime.

No politician got more recommendations on The Fix than the Minnesota Senator [Amy Klobuchar]. Klobuchar is young enough — 49 — and ambitious enough to make a bid [in 2016].

Sen Klobuchar, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, recently called out sexism against Judge Sotomayor.  According to the Minnesota Independent:

Klobuchar said she had bristled at “mostly anonymous question[ing of] Judge Sotomayor’s judicial temperament” and cited her own experience in Minnesota:  “Where I come from, asking tough questions and showing very little patience for unprepared lawyers is the very definition of a judge.”

Sexist standards implicit in such critiques “irritate me,” Klobuchar said, adding that the country should “appoint as many gruff, to-the-point female judges as gruff, to-the-point male judges.”

Yet she’s not a strictly girls’ team player, having endorsed then-Sen. Obama last March, months before then-Sen. Clinton conceded.  At the time of her endorsement, Klobuchar did decry what many saw as sexist pressure against Clinton to withdraw, saying:

She has every right to continue her campaign.  I don’t agree with those who have said things to the contrary.

Likewise, Klobuchar doesn’t strictly play on her party team.  A member of the Democrat-affiliated Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, she supports most Democratic positions.  However, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that she recently was the only Democrat to vote for a measure that would have required GM and Chrysler to issue stock to taxpayers.

Plus, she’s a pretty good comedienne.  Here’s a clip of her at the Washington Press Club:

Photo by Rebecca Drobis

TLC network has launched its second season of Toddlers & Tiaras, a show that follows little girls as they don spray tans, hair pieces and false eyelashes in their parents’ quests to win beauty pageants.  The tots also learn to strut, and according to the promo video  on the TLC site, shake their booties.  I found particularly heartbreaking the video of two-year-old Roni, who’s mother taught her to crook her finger and say:

Hey judges, come here, baby.

In their coverage of the new season, ABC points out that

A 2007 study by the American Psychological Association linked a premature emphasis on appearance with “three of the most common health problems of girls and women:  eating disorders, low self-esteem, and depression.”

But is the problem even worse than that?  The Facebook group “Help Ban the TLC show ‘Toddlers and Tiaras’” asserts that the show is “promoting pedophilia.”  My first reaction was skepticism, not only because I know nothing about the root causes of pedophelia, but also because the target audience for this show show couldn’t possibly be grown men — or could it?  The advertisement that I saw run before and beside Roni’s video on TLC’s website was for Mobil 1 motor oil.  Hmmm…..  On the other hand, I also saw ads for Bank of America Home Loans, Pur Water filters, and Suzuki. 

And then there’s this shot from the promo video of the less-widely available WeTV show Little Miss Perfect.

You can contact the viewer relations department of TLC parent Discovery communications here.  If you’re interested in watching Toddlers & Tiaras to note actual on-air advertisers, it comes on tonight at 10:00 pm.  Please come back here and post what you learn.

Meanwhile, here’s Chelsea Handler’s take on the subject:

Bianca Wisniewski. Photo by Siegel

Last week, construction supervisor Bianca Wisniewski filed a $20M sexual harassment lawsuit against JP Morgan and others.  As the NY Daily News reported:

Wisniewski “is a rare exception who broke through the concrete and steel,” lawyer Steve Wittels wrote in court papers.  “But the male-centric brotherood struck back at Ms. Wisniewski and quickly sealed the breach.”  Wisniewski says elevator operator Steve Greco groped and propositioned her while her bosses brushed off her claims…  “Everybody kisses engineer Steve,” the suit quotes Greco as boasting.  “This is a man’s world, not a place for women to work. ”

Carpenter Estelle St. Clair, photo by Joe Woothead

Only 2.7% of construction tradespeople are women, a figure that has barely budged in a decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.   However, as more women become the primary breadwinners for their families, high-wage, skilled-labor jobs may become more attractive to them.   Simultaneously, as the boomer generation of men retire, contractors may be looking for a more diverse replacement workforce.

There are signs that barriers to women in the field are falling.  For example, size and  strength no longer are dominant requirements.  Speaking to the Albany Business Review, Brendan Manning, education director for the General Building Contractors of New York said:

It’s not raw strength that allows you to do things.  It’s machines.  Women can do the job as well as men can; it’s just a matter of wanting to come into it.

Another falling barrier is that of safety.  OSHA is pushing for tools and equipment to be available sized to fit women’s hands, and several companies now specialize in safety gear specifically sized for women.  There’s also a proliferation of training courses geared to girls and women, such as the Mentoring a Girl in Construction program run by the National Association of Women in Construction,  as well as local organizations like Nontraditional Employment for Women, and numerous community college based programs.

Of course, the toughest barrier to break is the one that protects the Boy’s Only club.   But there are reports that even the sexism barrier may be falling.  In an interview in Manhattan newspaper DownTown Express, surveyor Arlene Fisher said:

Believe it or not, the guys on construction sites have good manners.

But just in case, according to the the DownTown Express story, carpenter Aisha Johns wears an engagement ring look-alike.

I wear the ring as a decoy, Johns said, laughing as she ate lunch on the edge of the construction site on a recent afternoon.  “They don’t really bother me,” she said of her male co-workers.  “I just use [the ring] to throw them off.”

While Mike Huckabee was sitting in for O’Reilly on FOX this week, Democratic Strategist Matthew Littman said:

I think Sarah Palin would be great on the Real Housewives of Wasilla…  She comes across really as quite a character, but not a figure that should be taken seriously on the national stage…

Washington Times reporter Amanda Carpenter countered:

To compare her to some tawdry character on a trashy TV show is insulting to someone who is the first woman vice presidential candidate within the Republican Party and a governor in her own right.  But I will say that

[Littman interrupts]  I think it’s insulting to the people on the housewives show actually.

Wow.  The sexism in that exchange is just too obvious to be worth commentary.  So let’s move on to moments that are  more intriguing.  When Huckabee asked if some of the attacks on Palin had been uncommonly brutal, Littman said that some of Palin’s attacks on the media and Obama have also been incredibly unfair and ridiculous.  Sounds to me like he’s came awfully close to blaming the victim, saying Palin deserves it.  He goes on to call Palin:

an incredibly dishonest politician, perhaps the most dishonest politician on the national stage since Nixon.

Bothered as I was by how Littman used those derogatory words, I was even more bothered by how he used his hands.  Check out the gesture he aims toward Carpenter at about 3:25.

He claps at her, the way you clap at a dog to get it to do a trick, and says “come on Amanda.”

Excuse me?  Does Matthew Littman think it’s acceptable to treat women like dogs?  Well, as a matter of fact, no, he doesn’t.  In fact, writing on The Huffington Post during the campaign, he said:

I am offended by the attacks on Senator Clinton because there is no question that the slams against her are hypocritical and come because she’s a woman.

Littman also used to be a speechwriter for then-Senator Joe Biden and for all I know he may have written some of the moving words Biden has delivered about violence against women.  If not, he’s still get kudos for speaking out against the media’s sexual exploitation of women who are victims.

So clearly, Littman doesn’t think it’s OK to treat all women like dogs.  No, he reserves his ”housewives” cracks and doggie claps for just some women.

Well, Matt, that’s not the way it works.  Sexism is not evil when it’s aimed at women with whom you agree and an acceptable rhetorical tool when aimed at women with whom you disagree.  It’s not offensive when you’re trying to build credibility as a speechwriter for democratic candidates, and then funny when you’re trying to build a reputation as a lively TV commentator.  We will never root out the prejudice that hampers the women and causes that we love while turning a blind eye toward the prejudice that hampers the women and causes that we hate.  The only way to stamp out gender bias against women is to stamp out gender bias against ALL women.  Come on, Matt, you can do better than this.

Gerrie Cobb, Astronette

Since the death of Walter Cronkite and the 40th anniversary of the moon landing have prompted Americans to reminisce about NASA, let’s include in our thoughts some of the women who have taken steps toward gender equality in space.

Record-setting commercial pilot Geraldyn “Gerrie” Cobb was the first of the “astronette” corps, a group of thirteen women who in 1959 passed the physical testing required of male astronauts.  Author Stephanie Nolan says:

Randy Lovelace, chair of NASA’s Life Sciences Committee and the doctor who supervised the selection of NASA’s Mercury astronauts, and Donald Flickinger, an air force brigadier general and pioneer in aviation medicine, came up with the plan for a woman-in-space program. They tested Jerrie Cobb, and she excelled on the same battery of tests her male counterparts took.

A Time magazine review of Martha Ackerman’s book on the subject relates that:

The tests were the same rigorous physical and psychological evaluations that the men of the Mercury program had undergone and that Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Right Stuff: Exercycle workouts, X rays, enemas, body-mass calculations, a sensory-isolation tank, even an enunciation test. The trials narrowed the field of women to 13… and to everybody’s surprise but their own, the women performed at the same level as the men…

But the macho culture of the space program was too entrenched to accommodate them. Vice President Lyndon Johnson scribbled on a memo about the initiative, “Let’s stop this now!”–and without much fanfare, it was stopped. The quest to put an American woman in space devolved into bureaucratic infighting and congressional subcommittee meetings, complete with cameos by John Glenn and Scott Carpenter and predictable old-boy jokes about the need for women to populate alien planets.

John Glenn’s testimony, according to People magazine, included these lines:

Men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes.  The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order. 

Even women weren’t ready to see women in space.  A Publisher’s Weekly review of Nolan’s book points out that one of the people to testify against the astronettes was female aviator Jackie Cochran.

…she didn’t want to antagonize powerful male friends, she didn’t want other women to overshadow her achievements and she felt that women weren’t physically capable of performing such activities.

Sally Ride

It wasn’t until 1983 that America first put a woman, Sally Ride, into space. (The Russians launched Valentina Tereshkova in 1963.)  Eileen Collins became the first female spacecraft commander in 2005, and became the first astronaut to pilot a shuttle through a 360-degree pitch maneuver.  As for the future, LBJ, we’re not gonna stop this now!

Pilot Major Jennifer L. Grieves of Glendale, AZ (left); with copilot Maj. Jennifer. L Marino of Palisade, CO; and crew chief Sgt. Rachael A. Sherman of Traverse City, MI.

The ABC Headline reads:

President Obama’s Historic First Female Helicopter Pilot

Huh?  Jennifer Grieves became the first female pilot of Marine One (the helicopter that transports the president) in May of 2008, initially serving President Bush.  Since Grieves’ shattering of what ABC called the “glass rotors” pre-dates President Obama’s election, and since as far as I can tell Obama had nothing to do with her accomplishment, why does he get the lead in the headline?  The story should be the woman who is accomplishing, not the man receiving the benefits of that accomplishment.

Grieves is in the news again because in celebration of the end of her time as a Marine One pilot, she was assigned an all female crew.  Here’s the AP report:

You stand out like a sore thumb in terms of your temperament.

We’ve said several times on this blog that it’s sexist to characterize women as  temperamental bullies just because they are tough.  But in case you’ve had any doubt about Graham’s tendency toward gender-biased imagery, he took the rhetoric to a whole new level:

It’s hard enough being a lawyer, having your client being there to begin with without the judge just beating you up for no good reason.

Oh, so now she has no good reasons.  She’s just hysterical.  And if that’s not enough, when Sotomayor tries to answer Graham’s question, he cuts her off (at 3:40), apparently much more interested in labeling her with sexist tags than in getting to know her.

This comes right on the heels of Graham’s statement that Sotomayor would be confirmed, provided that she didn’t have a “meltdown”.  When’s the last time anyone heard the spectre of a “meltdown” raised at a man’s confirmation?  Again, Graham appears eager to associate Sotomayor with sexist imagery.

I can think of so many snarky jokes to make here about thumbs and other fingers, but maybe I’ll just leave them to your immaginations.

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance… There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” Mr. Welch said those who take time off for family could be passed over for promotions if “you’re not there in the clutch. The women who have reached the top of Archer Daniels, of DuPont, I know these women. They’ve had pretty straight careers… We’d love to have more women moving up faster… but they’ve got to make the tough choices and know the consequences of each one.”

I appreciate the frank discussion of the steepness of the work/life challenge, but Welch seems to be forgetting something – like 49% of the population. Men increasingly are involved in family care and – knock on wood – that trend will continue. Welch’s seemingly assumption that family is an issue for women but not for men, and that this is imbalance will and should be unchanging, is stuck in a 1950’s time warp. Tough work-life choices and their consequences should apply equally to men and women.

The WSJ story continues:

Taking time off for family “can offer a nice life,” Mr. Welch said, “but the chances of going to the top on that path” are smaller. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have a nice career,” he added.

What I’m hearing him say: Nice little girls have nice families and nice little careers. Ugh. Showing your age, Jack. Time for that mindset to retire.