skirt! World Oct. 26

Women’s wages improving 

Women’s wages continue to gain ground on men’s wages, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. During the past two years, wages of the median woman rose 3.2 percent when adjusted for inflation, while the wages of the median man rose only 2 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported. Full-time female workers earned an average of $657 a week in the third quarter, while men averaged $812 a week. Meanwhile, the male jobless rate was 11 percent while for women it was 8.4 percent. “This is a situation where everyone’s losing but men are losing more, and that’s not really a victory for women,” Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute told the Journal.

Women in the Workforce

Women now make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce, and the vast majority of Americans think this is a good thing, according to a Time magazine poll. What’s more, about 40 percent of women are now the primary breadwinners for their families, said the survey. And not many people are worried about this development. Some 80 percent of women and 76 percent of men in the poll saw this as a positive development. On the other hand, 57 percent of men and 51 percent of women still believe it is better for a family if the father works and the mother stays at home to look after the children.

Renewed call for equality

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week marked the 15th anniversary of a “watershed” U.N. conference that called for women’s equality by urging all countries to renew their commitment to educate girls, end sexual violence and provide access to modern birth control, The Associated Press reported. Speaking at the General Assembly’s commemoration of the 1994 U.N. population conference, the U.N. chief hailed the progress achieved since the Cairo meeting but acknowledged that many problems remain.

For many people, he lamented, the action plan adopted by 180 governments “remains more a goal than a reality.” Underlying the conference was the record growth in global population, and research that showed that educated women choose to have fewer children. In 1994, the world’s population was 5.7 billion. According to the latest U.N. estimates, it will hit 7 billion early in 2012 and top 9 billion in 2050.

We’re all ears

If you’re pregnant and want to ease pelvic pain, apparently your ears can help. A new study shows that a special acupuncture technique in which pressure needles are taped to pregnant women’s ears reduces pain in the lower back and pelvic, Reuters reports. Women who had needles held in place at three acupuncture points for one week had significantly less pain than a control group of women who had needles placed in “sham” points. Shu-Ming Wang of the Yale School of Medicine, who led the research, said pregnant women often suffer from pain in the lower back and pelvis, and this can set the stage for chronic pain later on.

Unsafe abortions

Increased contraceptive use has led to fewer abortions worldwide, but deaths from unsafe abortion remain a severe problem, killing 70,000 women a year, a research institute reported last week in a major global survey. More than half the deaths, about 38,000, are in sub-Saharan Africa, which has the lowest rates of contraceptive use and the highest rates of unintended pregnancies, according to The Associated Press.

The report was compiled by the New York-based Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, and calls for further easing of developing nations’ abortion laws. Deirdre McQuade, a policy director with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, criticized that recommendation, saying “we need to be much more creative in assisting women with supportive services so they don’t need to resort to the unnatural act of abortion.”