Finland's Women-Led Government Has Equalized Family Leave: 7 Months For Each Parent Under the new policy, families are entitled to a total 14 months of paid leave. The health minister says the goal is to both improve gender equality and boost a declining birth rate. That’s Fourteen Months Fully Paid Leave.

I used to think the word “feminist” reeked of insecurity. A woman who needed to state that she was equal to a man might as well be shouting that she was smart or brave. If you were, you wouldn’t need to say it. I thought this because back then, I was a Swedish woman.

I was 9 when I first stepped into a Swedish school. Freshly arrived from Czechoslovakia, I was bullied by a boy for being an immigrant. My one friend, a tiny little girl, punched him in the face. I was impressed. In my former country, a bullied girl would tattle or cry. I looked around to see what my new classmates thought of my friend’s feat, but no one seemed to have noticed. It didn’t take long to understand that in Sweden, my power was suddenly equal to a boy’s.

In Czechoslovakia, women came home from a long day of work to cook, clean and serve their husbands. In return, those women were cajoled, ignored and occasionally abused, much like domestic animals. But they were mentally unstable domestic animals, like milk cows that could go berserk you if you didn’t know exactly how to handle them.

In Sweden, the housekeeping tasks were equally divided. Soon my own father was cleaning and cooking as well. Why? He had divorced my mother and married a Swedish woman.

Paulina Porizkova, Milan, 2010. Credit Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images As high school approached, the boys wanted to kiss us and touch us, and the girls became a group of benevolent queens dispensing favors. The more the boys wanted us, the more powerful we became. When a girl chose to bestow her favors, the lucky boy was envied and celebrated. Slut shaming? What’s a slut?

Condoms were provided by the school nurse without question. Sex education taught us the dangers of venereal diseases and unwanted pregnancy, but it also focused on fun stuff like masturbation. For a girl to own her sexuality meant she owned her body, she owned herself. Women could do anything men did, but they could also — when they chose to — bear children. And that made us more powerful than men. The word “feminist” felt antiquated; there was no longer a use for it.

When I moved to Paris at 15 to work as a model, the first thing that struck me was how differently the men behaved. They opened doors for me, they wanted to pay for my dinner. They seemed to think I was too delicate, or too stupid, to take care of myself.

Instead of feeling celebrated, I felt patronized. I claimed my power the way I had learned in Sweden: by being sexuality assertive. But Frenchmen don’t work this way. In discos, I’d set my eye on an attractive stranger, and then dance my way over to let him know he was a chosen one. More often than not, he fled. And when he didn’t run, he asked how much I charged.

In France, women did have power, but a secret one, like a hidden stiletto knife. It was all about manipulation: the sexy vixen luring the man to do her bidding. It wasn’t until I reached the United States, at 18, and fell in love with an American man that I truly had to rearrange my cultural notions.

It turned out most of America didn’t think of sex as a healthy habit or a bargaining tool. Instead, it was something secret. If I mentioned masturbation, ears went red. Orgasms? Men made smutty remarks, while women went silent. There was a fine line between the private and the shameful. A former gynecologist spoke of the weather when doing a pelvic exam, as if I were a Victorian maiden who’d rather not know where all my bits were.

In America, a woman’s body seemed to belong to everybody but herself. Her sexuality belonged to her husband, her opinion of herself belonged to her social circles, and her uterus belonged to the government. She was supposed to be a mother and a lover and a career woman (at a fraction of the pay) while remaining perpetually youthful and slim. In America, important men were desirable. Important women had to be desirable. That got to me.

In the Czech Republic, the nicknames for women, whether sweet or bitter, fall into the animal category: little bug, kitten, old cow, swine. In Sweden, women are rulers of the universe. In France, women are dangerous objects to treasure and fear. For better or worse, in those countries, a woman knows her place.

But the American woman is told she can do anything and then is knocked down the moment she proves it. In adapting myself to my new country, my Swedish woman power began to wilt. I joined the women around me who were struggling to do it all and failing miserably. I now have no choice but to pull the word “feminist” out of the dusty drawer and polish it up.

My name is Paulina Porizkova, and I am a feminist.

On National Women’s Physicians Day A Reminder that Women Save More Lives for Less Pay

Last July, a massive study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital uncovered an "atrocious" wage gap for doctors and other medical practitioners that grows more staggering with every rung up the ladder, and which guarantees women's salaries are nearly $20,000 less on average than those of their equally skilled, equally experienced male counterparts, or about 8% (as TIME points out, doctoring while black also has serious financial downsides). And it seems to be getting worse.

The Scammers, the Scammed and America’s Fate

Paul Krugman, March 24, 2017

Many people are horrified, and rightly so, by what passes for leadership in today’s Washington. And it’s important to keep the horror of our political situation up front, to keep highlighting the lies, the cruelty, the bad judgment. We must never normalize the state we’re in.

At the same time, however, we should be asking ourselves how the people running our government came to wield such power. How, in particular, did a man whose fraudulence, lack of concern for those he claims to care about and lack of policy coherence should have been obvious to everyone nonetheless manage to win over so many gullible souls?

No, this isn’t a column about whatshisname, the guy on Twitter, who’s getting plenty of attention. It’s about Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House.

I’m writing this column without knowing the legislative fate of the American Health Care Act, Mr. Ryan’s proposed Obamacare replacement. Whatever happens in the House and the Senate, however, there’s no question that the A.H.C.A. is one of the worst bills ever presented to Congress.

It would deprive tens of millions of health insurance — the decline in the number of insured Americans would be larger than what would result from simple repeal of Obamacare! — while sharply raising expenses for many of those who remain. It would be especially punitive for lower-income, older, rural voters.

In return, we would get a small reduction in the budget deficit. Oh, and a tax cut, perhaps as much as $1 trillion, for the wealthy.

This is terrible stuff. It’s made worse by the lies Mr. Ryan has been telling about his plan.

He claims that it would lower premiums; it would actually increase them. He claims that it would end the Obamacare death spiral; there isn’t a death spiral, and his plan would be more, not less, vulnerable to a vicious circle of rising premiums and falling enrollment. He claims that it would lead to “patient-centered care”; whatever that is supposed to mean, it would actually do nothing to increase choice.

Some people seem startled both by the awfulness of Mr. Ryan’s plan and by the raw dishonesty of his sales pitch. But why? Everything we’ve seen from Mr. Ryan amid the health care debacle — everything, that is, except the press coverage — has been completely consistent with his previous career. That is, he’s still the same guy I wrote about back in 2010, in a column titled “The Flimflam Man.”

I wrote that column in response to what turned out to be the first of a series of high-profile Ryan budget proposals. While differing in detail, all of these proposals share a family resemblance: Like his health plan, each involved savage cuts in benefits for the poor and working class, with the money released by these cuts used to offset large tax cuts for the rich. All were, however, sold on false pretenses as plans for deficit reduction.

Worse, the alleged deficit reduction came entirely from “magic asterisks”: claims about huge savings to be achieved by cutting unspecified government spending, huge revenue increases to be achieved by closing unspecified tax loopholes. It was a con job all the way.

So how did Mr. Ryan reach a position where his actions may reshape the lives of so many of his fellow citizens, in most cases very much for the worse? The answer lies in the impenetrable gullibility of his base. No, not his constituents: the news media, who made him what he is.

You see, until very recently both news coverage and political punditry were dominated by the convention of “balance.” This meant, in particular, that when it came to policy debates one was always supposed to present both sides as having equally well-founded arguments. And this in turn meant that it was necessary to point to serious, honest, knowledgeable proponents of conservative positions.

Enter Mr. Ryan, who isn’t actually a serious, honest policy expert, but plays one on TV. He rolls up his sleeves! He uses PowerPoint! He must be the real deal! So that became the media’s narrative. And media adulation, more than anything else, propelled him to his current position.

Now, however, the flimflam has hit a wall. Mr. Ryan used to be able to game the Congressional Budget Office, getting it to produce reports that looked to the unwary like proper scores of his plans, but weren’t. This time, however, he couldn’t pull it off: The C.B.O. told the devastating truth about his plan, and his evasions and lies were too obvious to ignore.

There’s an important lesson here, and it’s not just about health care or Mr. Ryan; it’s about the destructive effects of false symmetry in reporting at a time of vast asymmetry in reality.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq. 

https://youtu.be/l_uaonZNO60

Here's all you need to know about your disability - whether temporary, or permanent - and your job, and work, and your employment, what are your rights?

To misappropriate Dr. Martin Luther King's prior statement, "The arc of the disability universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Over the last 20-some odd years, since the Americans Disabilities Act was enacted in 1991, the definition of disability has become way more expansive under federal law. And then every analogue state or city law that has been legislated and enacted since then, tends to define disability more progressively. It's no longer necessary that you have a certain established, bona fide disability that affects a major life activity in some negative way. It can be now essentially anything that's diagnosed by a healthcare provider that is some kind of impairment, or condition, or established challenge to some part of your body, that is an ailment of some sort. And even these days, pregnancy, pregnancy-related challenges are also covered under the various statutes that now define disability way more broadly.

So, your employer must engage in an interactive process with you, a cooperative dialogue at the very least, to determine the balance between your needs - the needs of the one, versus the needs of the many - your company. Unless it's an undue hardship on the company to work with you, to give you a week, a month, three months, four months off to recover, or, to give you a different schedule, or to help you orthopedically in some way, so that you can perform the essential functions of your job even though it is "special treatment," they must do that. They must do that. Now there are certain limitations, that your employer must have 15 employees under federal law to be covered. Most state laws require far less employees, such as in New York where just 4 are required for coverage under the anti-discrimination statutes.

So whatever the challenge you're facing, whether it is something related to pregnancy, or you have influenza, or a more serious issue and you need your employer to work with you, be flexible, compassionate, reasonably accommodate you - make sure that you're documenting all of this, putting it in writing, so you'll have a paper trail, because your employer can’t just be dismissive and cavalier and say, “Sorry, it's too much of a pain in the butt for us, we're not dealing with you anymore.” That would be illegal disability discrimination; now totally separate issue from whether you get paid for the time off, totally separate. Is there short-term disability insurance involved, is there a state or city law that requires a certain amount of earned, paid sick time that you might have in the bank, can you use your own accrued vacation time or other paid time off, substitute it in and get paid - that's also sort of a separate issue because maybe you don't have time, and maybe you won't be paid by your job if you're out sick for certain period of time.

But that doesn't mean they can fire you. That's the distinction. You may not get paid but you can't be fired for your disability unless your employer can demonstrate that your challenges are an undue hardship on the business, and that they therefore have gone well above and beyond what they need to do and sorry, goodbye, you're fired.

I hope that clarifies the disability discrimination statutes and your employment. If you have particular questions about your workplace challenges, or a loved ones’ workplace issues, feel free to call me, I’m Jack Tuckner, and we will consult, in total confidence, of course, to see about empowering you through your workplace challenges.