13 Women Who Should Run for President in 2020

Just wanted to share this article I saw on the New Yorker about thirteen amazing women who should consider running for president in 2020. On the list are several awesome people, including almost all of the female senators and a few female representatives, as well as businesswomen (Sheryl Sandberg) and Republican politicians (Susan Collins and Nikki Haley)!

Definitely worth a read: http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/thirteen-women-who-should-think-about-running-for-president-in-2020?intcid=popular

Hidden Figures movie

I found this movie trailer a couple days ago and it looks like it should be really good. It tells the story of three African American women who worked for NASA when they were sending John Glenn into orbit. It seems like it should be pretty historically accurate too, as at least one of the actual women is helping with the plot line. Check it out, and good luck on finals this week!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK8xHq6dfAo

A New Face on the Canadian Dollar Bill

Hello all! I just came across this news that my friend posted on Facebook. Black rights activist Viola Desmond is the 1st Canadian woman on the $10 bill. Fun fact: she was known as "Canada's Rosa Parks" 9 years before the incident in Montgomery, Alabama with Parks herself! Instead of the bus, she occupied a seat in the Roseland Theatre (and very close to my name!) in the "whites-only" section.

Find out more about the story here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-banknote-woman-1.3885844

East Side Sushi

Over Thanksgiving break, I watched a part of this movie with my family that we happened to stumble upon on TV. As I was watching it, I realized how pertinent the themes of the movie fits with our class! It's called East Side Sushi and it's about a Latina woman, Juana, who wants to become a sushi chef while she is working in a Japanese restaurant as an underpaid kitchen assistant. However, the very traditional, male Japanese owner refused to promote her even though she demonstrated her passion and self-taught skill. As a woman of color, Juana faced double discrimination by her gender and racial discrimination from her boss.

I don't want to give away the whole plot, but I would say it's a movie that I highly recommend for you to watch with your friends and family over break! (It has a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes!) Click on the link to watch the trailer!

How Politics Killed Universal Child Care In The 1970s

NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports on how in 1971, the United States came very close to having universal, federally subsidized child care. This piece examines how Congress came to pass the legislation, and why President Nixon vetoed it. It expands on the story that Gail Collins tells in When Everything Changed.

American Revolutionary: The life of Chinese-American civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs

Check out this trailer for a new documentary about Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American radical activist who devoted 70 years to the black freedom struggle and other social movements. Her story is extraordinary!

"Womenomics" in Japan

I'm taking a sociology class at Pomona this semester called Population & the Environment. For our final projects, one student presented on Japan's aging population, and brought up the idea of increasing the number of women in the Japanese workforce.

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe set a goal that 30% of the top executive positions in the country would be held by women by 2020—the program was called "Womenomics." Last year, however, his administration had to lower the percentage target to 7%, because it just wasn't working.

Many attribute this failure to the fact that women's and men's social roles are still resolutely held in Japan, and women are expected to stay at home with children. However, I looked into it a little more, and this doesn't seem to be entirely true—I found another article showing that women's (15-64) participation in the workforce in Japan is greater than that of the United States.

The corporate world in Japan is not just a boys' club - it's an old men's club. In my opinion, there might just be a prejudice that young people can't achieve positions of executive management—let alone women getting up at the top, which might be unheard of, given the existence of "salarymen" as such a defining job term.

I think it's interesting to see how a governmental action could affect decisions in the private sector. I'm not too sure yet what the consequences or incentives are for achieving Abe's goal, but I don't think anything like this would ever happen in the US. If it did, do you guys think it would work?