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  • More Women On UK Company Boards; Could It have Made a Difference in the Banking Crisis?

    The English Parliament’s Select Treasury Committee has released a publication,  Women in the City [of London]. What follows is the summary:

    The recent financial crisis has shone the spotlight upon the City of London and the need for reform to increase financial stability. Whilst most of the discussion has inevitably focussed on issues such as the structure of the banking sector, changes to the regulatory regime for banks and the bail-out of the banking system, there has also been a lively debate about changes to corporate governance to improve governance and oversight within large financial institutions.

    Part of the debate on corporate governance in the City of London has been around diversity and the need for challenge. In general women are in the minority at senior levels in financial institutions — especially at the top. The boards of FTSE 100 banks are only 9% female and the proportion of women executive directors is even lower at 1-2%. We believe the lack of diversity on the boards of many, if not most, of our major financial institutions, may have heightened the problems of ‘group-think’ and made effective challenge and scrutiny of executive decisions less effective.

    Professor Charles Goodhart even suggested that greater female representation at senior levels would have made the banking crisis less likely. Whilst this may be going too far, a sector which is failing to properly utilise the talents of over half the population clearly has substantial room for improvement. This entails looking more widely at the industry structure, to ensure that able women who wish to progress are not held back, which is why this Report also examines matters such as the long hours culture, the working environment and access to flexible working and family-friendly practices.

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  • Love Your Library

    Julia Sneden writes: If an asteroid collision wiped our electrical grids, or atomic warfare blew us back toward the Stone Age, the first place I would head would be to the library, because there surely wouldn’t be any more click-and-find information for a long time.  

  • VA Has Taken Steps to Make Services Available to Women Veterans, but Needs to Revise Key Policies and Improve Oversight Processes

    Why GAO Did This Study

    In 2008, VA provided health care to over 281,000 women veterans, a fast growing subgroup of veterans. Women veterans seeking VA health care need access to an array of services and Congress has raised concerns about how well VA is prepared to meet the physical and mental health care needs of women. GAO was asked to examine (1) the on-site availability of health care services at VA facilities for women veterans, (2) the extent to which VA facilities are following VA policies that apply to the delivery of health care to women veterans, and (3) key challenges that VA facilities face in providing health care to women veterans and how VA is addressing these challenges. GAO reviewed applicable laws and VA policies, interviewed officials, and visited a judgmental sample of 9 VA medical centers (VAMC) and 10 community-based outpatient clinics (CBOC) chosen, in part, based on the number of women using services. GAO also visited 10 VA counseling centers (Vet Centers).

    What GAO Recommends

    GAO recommends that VA provide complete information on its external Web sites about specialized residential programs for women; verify the information facilities report on compliance with privacy policies; expedite action to update VA’s design and construction policies; and clarify the roles and responsibilities of the Women Veterans Program Manager (WVPM). VA concurred with GAO’s recommendations.

    What GAO Found
     The VA facilities GAO visited provided basic gender-specific and outpatient mental health services to women veterans on site, and some facilities also provided specialized services for women. Seventeen of the 19 medical facilities GAO visited offered basic gender-specific services including pelvic examinations and cervical cancer screening on site, and 15 offered access to one or more female providers for gender-specific care. The availability of specialized gender-specific services—such as treatment of reproductive cancers—and mental health services for women varied by service and facility. While some VAMCs offered a broad array of specialized gender-specific care on site, smaller CBOCs referred women to other VA or non-VA facilities for many or most of these services. Nationally, 9 VAMCs have residential mental health programs that are for women only or have dedicated cohorts for women. However, information about all of these programs was not available on VA’s external Web sites.

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  • Cancer and the Media; How Does the News Report on Treatment and Outcomes?

    The Archives of Internal Medicine recently posted an article (Vol. 170 No. 6, March 22, 2010) and abstract we found to be of interest; it’s written by Jessica Fishman, PhD; Thomas Ten Have, PhD; David Casarett, MD, MA

    Background: Cancer receives a great deal of news media attention. Although approximately half of all US patients with cancer die of their illness or of related complications, it is unknown whether reports in the news media reflect this reality.

    Methods: To determine how cancer news coverage reports about cancer care and outcomes, we conducted a content analysis of US cancer news reporting in 8 large-readership newspapers and 5 national magazines. Trained coders determined the proportion of articles reporting about cancer survival, cancer death and dying, aggressive cancer treatment, cancer treatment failure, adverse events of cancer treatment, and end-of-life palliative or hospice care.

    Results: Of 436 articles about cancer, 140 focused on survival and only 33 focused on death and dying. Only 57 articles  reported that aggressive cancer treatments can fail, and 131 reported that aggressive treatments can result in adverse events. Although most articles discussed aggressive treatments exclusively, almost none (2 of 436) discussed end-of-life palliative or hospice care exclusively, and only a few (11 of 436) discussed aggressive treatment and end-of-life care.

    Conclusions: News reports about cancer frequently discuss aggressive treatment and survival but rarely discuss treatment failure, adverse events, end-of-life care, or death. These portrayals of cancer care in the news media may give patients an inappropriately optimistic view of cancer treatment, outcomes, and prognosis.

    The press release from Penn afforded more information:  The study notes that unrealistic optimism is presented in most stories about cancer treatment, when in reality half of all cancer patients do not survive, according to statistics from the American Cancer Society.

    “The nation’s leading media institutions have set a low bar for routine coverage of the nation’s long-running war on cancer. Hype is the norm,” wrote medical author Merrill Goozner, MS, in a commentary accompanying the article. “The relationship between journalism and medical researchers has been called a complicit collaboration in which both benefit from sensationalized stories. Recent media cutbacks and the evolution of a hyper speed news cycle only made things worse.”

     

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  • Resolving Work-Life Conflicts; It’s Time for Policies to Match Modern Family Needs

    The Center for American Progress released a poll they took regarding creating policies to address work-family conflicts.

    Men and women have a strong appetite for businesses and the government to implement policies to address work-family conflict. And it’s not only progressives who want change. These issues have strong resonance across a wide range of demographic groups. People agree across ideology, class, and family type that government and businesses need to do more to adapt to the new ways we work and live. This includes increased access to workplace flexibility, more funding for child care, and paid family and medical leave.

    The findings summarized here come from a poll conducted with The Rockefeller Foundation and TIME during early September 2009. The poll interviewed more than 3,400 adults across the country about how changes in the economy are influencing attitudes about gender relations, family, and the workplace.

    The poll confirmed that overwhelming majorities of both men and women believe that government and businesses need to adapt and that businesses that do not change will be left behind. The only issues that reveal ideological differences involve government-funded childcare and, to a lesser extent, requiring businesses to provide employees with more flexibility in hours or schedules. Yet even in these cases a majority of even conservative respondents agree that policies need to change.

    This new poll data shows that policies to address work-family conflict carry out the message quite well and resonate with the American public. Families have for too long struggled to make their jobs fit their family life as the institutions around them continue to assume that the typical worker has a stay-at-home spouse and that the typical caregiver has a full-time breadwinner for income support. The public is hungry for change.

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  • Woman of Note: Nancy Pelosi, the woman referred to as having a spine of steel and a love of dark chocolate

    NPR’s Andrea Seabrook interviewed Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi about the Speaker of the House’s power and finesse in helping steer, raise “from the ashes” and pass the health reform bill:

    Listen to that interview and the comments of Rep. Rosa DeLauro and others, including Republican Leader John Boehner. The woman referred to as having a “strong spine of steel” cites her love of dark chocolates as a source of her survival during the many long hours she spent trying to ‘whip’ the legislation along.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=125294497&m=125294481

    What follows is from the NPR transcript of the segment, Health Care Overhaul Boosts Nancy Pelosi’s Clout, from the March 29th Morning Edition program introduced by Mary Louise Kelly and reported by Ms. Seabrook:

    SEABROOK: After that, [Rep. Rosa]DeLauro and others say, Pelosi began an unbelievable marathon of meetings that would last two months. She hunkered down with the House Progressive Caucus, the Conservative Blue Dog Coalition, regional groups, anti-abortion lawmakers. Van Hollen says she would gather people in a room and keep them there until they reached agreement.

    Rep. VAN HOLLEN: Very literally, there are people who you can sometimes see trying to sneak out of the door in the room and she will see them out of the corner of the eye and say, hey, where do you think you’re going right now? Get back in here. We have to finish this discussion.

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  • Review: Field Notes From Elsewhere by Mark C. Taylor

    Joan L. Cannon reviews: The arrangement of essays is constructed over 52 days divided into ‘AM.’ and ‘PM.’ The subjects range from the everyday to the exceptional, from childhood to 9/11, gardening to cancer, concrete to abstract. Every entry depends heavily on perceptions based on contradictions.

  • An EPI Paper, Unfair China Trade Costs Local Jobs

    The Economic Policy Institute released  a paper by Robert Scott that points out that, among other things,  by their currency manipulation, China is able to keep the cost of exports artificially low:

    All 50 states have lost jobs to China
    “As concern over the US-China trade imbalance grows, a new paper by EPI’s Senior International Economist Robert Scott finds that 2.4 million American jobs have been lost to China between 2001 and 2008, and that every state along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico has felt the impact.”

    “Scott’s paper, Unfair China Trade Costs Local Jobs, provides the first detailed analysis of the jobs that have been lost since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. It finds that, in addition to impacting every US state, the job loss has touched every Congressional district in the country.” [Editor’s Note: Links to the PDF or Excel files to the tables by congressional district or district by alphabetical listing are below:]

    • Supplemental Table A: Net job loss due to growing trade deficits with China, 2001-08, by Congressional district [PDF] [Excel]
    • Supplemental Table B: Net job loss in Congressional districts due to growing trade deficits with China, 2001-08, alphabetical [PDF] [Excel]

    New Hampshire, California, Texas all suffer big losses: “Scott’s paper features a color-coded US map illustrating where job loss has been the most severe, as well as several detailed charts that measure job loss by industry and by state. New Hampshire, which lost 16,300 jobs during the seven-year period covered by the study, suffered the largest job loss as a share of total employment. In terms of total jobs displaced, California was first, with 370,000 jobs lost, followed by Texas, New York, Illinois, and Florida, which all lost more than 100,000 jobs.”

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  • The NRDC asks: How Green Are Your Jeans? We Ask Do You Use Them for Insulation?

    We used recycled-content dry blown-in cellulose insulation for  most of our new house (http://house.seniorwomen.com), but when looking at Josie Glausiusz’s article for the NRDC’s magazine, OnEarth, questions arise as to the use of even some of the insulation made from blue jeans byproducts.

    (We were glad to see that Wikipedia’s page on cellulose states: “Another major reason for the comeback of cellulose might be because of the increased interest in green building. Cellulose has the highest recycled content of any insulation material and also has less embodied energy than fiberglass and other furnace produced mineral insulations.”)

    How Green Are Your Jeans? by Josie Glausiusz

    Some 450 million pairs of jeans are sold in the United States each year — 1.5 pairs for every man, woman, and child. The average woman has eight pairs in her closet. Chances are that to make those jeans, cotton crops were drenched in pesticides; fibers were stained with toxic dyes; and the resulting fabric was sandblasted, chemically softened, and ripped and scrunched to create the wrinkles and tears that make new jeans look perfectly broken in.

    There is another option: the eco-minded can invest in a pair of jeans woven from organic cotton, dyed with natural indigo, and faded with nontoxic ozone. These eco-jeans are pricier than the conventional pants peddled at your local superstore (though not necessarily costlier than high-fashion conventional jeans), but how much healthier for the environment are they? A close look at America’s favorite apparel reveals some surprising wrinkles.

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  • Untangling the Web — Patients, Doctors, and the Internet

    This perspective is written by MDs Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman for the New England Journal of Medicine; a few paragraphs follow:

    One woman with recently diagnosed lupus told us, “I really don’t want to read what’s on the Internet, but I can’t help myself.” Her condition is currently stable, but she finds herself focusing on the worst possible complications of the disease, such as cerebral vasculitis. Although her doctor gave her detailed information, she cannot resist going on the Web to seek out new data and patients’ stories.”It’s hard to make out what all of this means for my case,”she said. “Half the time, I just end up scaring myself.”

    Other patients whose diseases have no ready cure are drawn to chat rooms and Web sites that may make unsubstantiated claims — assertions that macrobiotic diets cure aggressive lymphoma, that AIDS can be treated with hyperbaric oxygen, that milk thistle remedies chronic hepatitis, and myriad other fallacious claims. Falsehoods are easily and rapidly propagated on the Internet: once you land on a site that asserts a false rumor as truth, hyperlinks direct you to further sites that reinforce the falsehood. Material is perceived as factual merely because it is on a computer screen. We sometimes find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to dissuade desperate and vulnerable patients from believing false testimonials. Doctors may be perceived as closed-minded, dismissive, or ignorant of “novel therapies” when they challenge such Internet rumors.

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