A federal judge has agreed to hear arguments is a sex discrimination case brought by women employees of Walmart in California. The case, Dukes vs Walmart, is a class-action suit that alleges that female employees in California did not receive the same pay or promotion rates as their male counterparts in Walmart stores throughout the […]
Congressman Todd Akin (R-MO) has passed the deadline for withdrawing his campaign for the United States Senate, meaning he will officially be on the ballot in November challenging incumbent Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO). Many had urged Akin to drop out of the race before today’s deadline after his infamous statements on “legitimate rape.” “For the […]
Women are running for congress in record numbers this year. Now that all candidates have been nominated for the November 6th elections, 18 women are running for Senate (the previous record was set in 2010 at 14), and 163 women are running for House seats (more than the 2004 record of 141). “Not since the […]
Michelle Obama gave a speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation last Saturday night focused on getting out the vote. Although Obama made no direct reference to the voter-ID laws that have dominated much of the news cycle this election season, she drew comparisons between turning out the vote to the civil rights struggles of […]
New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez (R) removed a provision of new proposed updates to the state’s Child Care Assistance Policy that would add “forcible rape” as a condition for those seeking assistance. The Children, Youth, and Families Department’s (CYFD) policy originally stated that a woman seeking assistance for a child must be in contact with […]
Arguments began yesterday over a 1995 Illinois state law requiring anyone 17 years or younger to notify a parent before seeking an abortion. The 17 year old law has yet to be enforced because of a string of multiple lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the law. Medical professionals who are represented by the ACLU are […]
Proscovia Alengot Oromait has been elected to the Ugandan Parliament at age 19. She is the youngest politician elected in not only Uganda, but all of Africa. According to Buzzfeed, Alengot Oromait won in a landslide, receiving twice as many votes as her runner up. The teenager decided to run for Parliament to fill her […]
Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress, yesterday in ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was joined by House and Senate leaders alongside Buddhist monks and women in traditional Burmese dress in presenting the award. Suu Kyi met with […]
Chick-Fil-A has agreed to stop funding of anti-LGBT organizations such as Focus on the Family and the National Organization for Marriage according to a statement issued Wednesday. Earlier in the day, the Illinois-based LGBT advocacy group The Civil Rights Agenda (TCRA) had announced that Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno had received a letter from the organization […]
The District of Columbia’s Office of Human Rights launched a Transgender and Gender Identity Respect Campaign last week with the aim of “promoting respect for the District’s transgender and gender non-conforming communities.” This is the first government funded campaign of its kind. The campaign includes a series of print PSAs featuring transgender and gender-non-conforming Washingtonians. Each […]
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided on Tuesday that if voting IDs will not be readily available in time for the November 2012 election, the state’s new voter ID law cannot go into effect. The law, enacted in March, requires that every person must have a Department of Transportation (PennDOT) photo ID in order to vote […]
On Tuesday, the Chicago Teacher Union voted to end their week and a half long strike and return to the classroom Wednesday morning. For the first time since 1987, Chicago’s public school teachers went on strike on September 10th. A vast majority of the teacher’s unions’ 800 delegates voted to end the strike and return […]
A new poll released today by NBC/Wall Street Journal shows that female voters nationally favor President Obama by ten points. While the poll (see PDF) showed that President Obama was ahead of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney by five points overall, the gender gap between the two candidates increased to ten points. In individual states […]
Yesterday the United Nations released “Born Free and Equal,” a 60-page booklet detailing the basic legal rights States must provide LGBT individuals. In the pamphlet[PDF], the U.N. details five strategic areas to improve the condition of LGBT individuals: Protect LGBT people from violence, Prevent torture and inhumane treatment of detained LGBT individuals, Repeal laws criminalizing […]
Many women in Bangladesh face poverty after a failed marriage as the result of discriminatory family laws according to a new Human Rights Watch report released on Monday. According to the report, outdated family laws that do not recognize the rights of women in cases of divorce and abandonment drive women to stay in abusive […]
Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Stephen Woodworth has proposed a private-member bill calling for the study of when a baby becomes a human being. MP Woodworth’s motion (motion 312) would review part of the Canadian homicide Criminal Code which states that a fetus becomes a human being at the moment of birth. Woodworth told reporters […]
In Iowa, Judge Mary Pat Gunderson issued a temporary injunction on Friday to stay the implementation of the swing state’s new voter suppression rules. The rules, which included regulations to verify citizenship, were pushed through by Secretary of State Matt Schultz and passed earlier this summer through an emergency rulemaking process. Gunderson’s ruling does not […]
Judge Juan B Colas of Dane County Circuit Court ruled late Friday on a 2011 anti-public-employee-union Wisconsin law, ruling most of it unconstitutional. The law was pushed through by Republican Governor Scott Walker. Known as Act 10, the law severely restricted union rights for public workers, nullifying most of the protections contained in Wisconsin’s fifty-year-old […]
A Cook County Circuit Court judge has prevented an attempt by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools to forcibly end the teachers’ strike by refusing to schedule a hearing for today. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools filed a suit against the Chicago Teacher’s Union for their continued strike after Sunday negotiations […]
Today the Virginia Board of Health met and voted 13-2 to reverse their June decision to grandfather in existing clinics, exempting them from new, hospital-like restrictions for the state’s abortion clinics, commonly called TRAP laws or Targeted Regulations of Abortion Providers. Instead, the board has allowed existing clinics to come into compliance with regulations within […]
