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Women can run businesses but Americans don't want them in office.

Back in 2018, a survey found that Americans are more in favor of a female CEO than a female head of government. According to the TheReykjavik Index for Leadership, which was conducted by data and consultancy company Kantar in order to measure how people feel about women in leadership, 65 percent of Americans feel “very comfortable with the idea of a female CEO, but only 5 percent feel the same way about a female head of government.


The survey also highlighted the difference in opinion between genders. Not surprising, more women were in favor with a woman in power, with 70 percent of women stating they felt “very comfortable” with a female CEO, and only 55 percent of men stating the same thing. Only 45 percent of men expressed they felt this way about a female head of government.The results were published at the Women Political Leaders Global Forum in Reykjavik, Iceland.

The study was conducted between September and October, and interviewed over 10,000 people in each of the G7 countries.

Interestingly, the United States ranked third in comfortability with a female head of government, but first with a female CEO.

Here’s how the G7countries ranked in terms of feeling “Very comfortable” with a female head of government:

1. United Kingdom, 58percent

2. Canada, 57 percent

3. United States, 52 percent

4. Italy, 42 percent

5. France, 40 percent

6. Germany, 26 percent

7. Japan, 23 percent

And how the G7 countries ranked in terms of feeling “Very comfortable” with a female CEO:

1. United States, 63 percent

2. Canada (tied), 59 percent

3. United Kingdom (tied), 59 percent

4. France, 44 percent

5. Italy, 42 percent

6. Germany, 29 percent

7. Japan, 24 percent

It looks like your daughter stands a chance of becoming the next Theresa May in England, but in America, she’d be better off striving to become the next Indra Nooyi.

With that said, the study has been lauded as a step in the right direction for increasing the transparency of public opinion.

23%of german men feel comfortable with having a womanceo...

THIS IS SO 1950

Check out theReykjavik Index for Leadership.#PowerTogether#WomenLeadersIceland@WPLGlobalForum@Kantarpic.twitter.com/Q2y8Stz1AW

—Henrike von Platen (@henrikeVplaten) November27, 2018

This article originally appeared on 12.23.18


Lauren Miranda, a middle school math teacher, was fired after a shirtless photo she sent to her boyfriend back in 2016 ended up in her student's hands.

Miranda didn't choose to send the photos to her students — or anyone other than her boyfriend at the time. It's quite baffling that the school that employed her felt justified in ending her employment for their distribution.

But the case goes deeper than that. Miranda feels the consequence she endured has more to do with gender discrimination.


She believes if she were a man, her job wouldn't have been in jeopardy. That's why she's refusing to walk away without a fight.

In addition to a $3 million gender discrimination suit — think the unfair double standards women are subjected to related to attire and decency — she's going to do everything she can to bring attention to the way women are regularly victimized by people on the internet sharing their photos without consent.

"How do girls feel when this happens to them?" Miranda told VICE News. "Their photo gets shared without their permission or consent. And what do we say to them?: Crawl in a hole, quit going to school...?”

​​Cyber security and online privacy have been hot topics since the beginning of the internet. In the last few years, however, the discussion has gotten a lot more complicated, especially with regard to sharing personal photos.​​

A wide range of arguments have been made for who owns photos that are put into this public sphere. Everything from hackers to cell phone malfunctions and even a company's right to sell our personal information to 3rd parties keep us from reaching a conclusion. But few aspects of personal data have been as concerning and contested as personal photos containing nudity.

So once again, the public is calling into question the appropriate course of action for victims of non-consenting photo sharing.

Unfortunately, it's just the latest in a long line of photo-sharing incidents that has impacted people — disproportionately women — globally.

In fact, it's impacted developed nations so severely that revenge porn legislation is being put in place. And in some countries like South Korea, photos being shared without women's consent has led to the widespread scrutiny of the entire K pop industry.

And back at Bellport Middle School, many parents and community members are rallying behind Miranda, vocalizing their frustration with the situation. And strangers on social media are echoing their sentiments.

Women's rights activists suggest that we must point out the hypocrisy of this situation. Standards of purity and conduct are often enforced much more strongly with women than men.

In today's world, it is unrealistic to assume that sexting and nude photos won't wind up in the virtual world somehow. It is no one else's right to tell us that we can't or shouldn't share images of our bodies with others. However, that doesn't mean we should be powerless to stop them from impacting our lives in a negative way if they are somehow shared without our consent.

Instead of focusing on whether or not images should be shared, because we know they will, we need to put forth more effort into deciding the consequences when someone's images are shared without permission.​​

While the U.S. argues over building a wall on the U.S. Mexican border, a massive "green" wall is going up across the continent of Africa.

When we think of walls, we usually think of a structure to keep people and/or animals out or in. But The Great Green Wall being built across Africa has an entirely different purpose.

The Sahel region, along the southern border of the Sahara desert, is one of the poorest regions in the world, and one of the most impacted by climate change so far. Persistent drought and lack of food has created conflicts over resources and forced people to migrate away from the region. The Great Green Wall project is an ambitious attempt to mitigate the environmental and economic effects of climate change in this part of Africa, utilizing nature itself to do so.


The goal is to create a 6000-mile (8000 km) "living wonder" across the entire width of the continent, from Senegal to Djibouti, restoring the degraded land and creating millions of jobs in the process. The project involves planting trees and other vegetation—hence the "green wall"—but its impact goes far beyond adding greenery to the landscape.

The Great Green Wall tackles many issues at once, including many of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.

The UN hopes to make significant progress in improving the lives of people around the globe by 2030 with its Sustainable Development Goals. The Great Green Wall helps with many of them. It helps battle poverty by providing food security and opportunity for farming and businesses to grow from it. It supports gender equality by improving water security so women and girls don't have to walk long distances to collect water and by empowering women with new opportunities. It provides environmental resistance to climate change in an area where temperatures are rising the fastest.

It's also an important symbol of peace, unity, and hope in a world that can sometimes feel hopelessly divided. Twenty African nations have joined together on the project since its inception a decade ago. The wall is now 15% underway, and while ongoing support is needed for the work to accelerate to a good pace, the groundwork has been laid. If this desolate region can be brought to life environmentally, economically, and societally, it will show the rest of the world what's possible when diverse people work together toward a common goal.

When complete, the Great Green Wall will be the largest living structure on the planet, three times the size of the Great Barrier Reef.

The project an enormous undertaking for sure. But many international organizations, including the African Union, European Union, World Bank, and United Nations are partnering to bring it to fruition.

The African Union Commissioner for the Sahara and Sahel Great Green Wall Initiative, Elvis Paul Tangam, says that the key to the project is how it involves and empowers the people. “The Great Green Wall is about development; it’s about sustainable, climate-smart development, at all levels...It’s about ownership, and that has been the failure of development aid, because people were never identified with it. But this time they identify. This is our thing.”

"The Great Green Wall promises to be a real game-changer, providing a brighter future for rural youth in Africa and a chance to revitalize whole communities," says Monique Barbut, Executive Secretary of the UNCCD. "It can unite young people around a common, epic ambition: to ‘Grow a 21st Century World Wonder,' across borders and across Africa."

And Ireland's President, Michael D. Higgins says, "With its capacity to unite nations and communities in solidarity, the Great Green Wall represents the best kind of international cooperation that will be required in this century."

A wall that unites people and creates economic opportunity for people living on either side of it? So here for it. If you are too, The Great Green Wall asks that you share the project and sign the Great Green Pledge that helps them have more power to lobby governments and organizations to support the movement.

Let's let the world know that this is the kind of wall we'd like to see more of.

Growing a World Wonder (Virtual Reality film)

A groundbreaking 360° film about Africa’s Great Green Wall, and the people growing it.

Posted by Great Green Wall on Wednesday, December 2, 2015

A North Carolina school required girls to wear skirts as part of their uniform. Two years ago, three female students decided to take a stand against the outdated code.

Keely Burks, 14, and the oldest of the three, created a petition asking her school to change its policy requiring the female students to wear skirts or risk punishment, which under the school’s policy could include calling parents, removing them from class and possibly expulsion. She herself had been punished for wearing shorts and was forced to “sit in the office all day” until her mother came to pick her up.

Burks explained that wearing skirts was a burden early on in her education. They kept her from sitting cross-legged like the boys, do cartwheels at recess or play soccer.


“My friends and I got more than 100 signatures on our petition, but it was taken from us by a teacher and we never got it back,” the eighth grader said in a post on the ACLU website. She continued by explaining that a few parents asked about changing the policy, but the school refused to hear them, claiming that making girls wear skirts promotes “chivalry” and “traditional values.”

The girls weren’t deterred. Instead of dropping the issue, they asked the ACLU to step in.

The human rights organization obliged, filing a lawsuit claiming the policy “violates the law and discriminates against girls.”

In their lawsuit, the group pointed out the obvious: that forcing girls to wear skirt was not only a distraction from academics, but also made it hard for them to engage in physical activity, sometimes resulting in discomfort and them being unnecessarily cold.

What gave the lawsuit weight was this is far from an isolated situation. Many girls across the United States are required to wear skirts as part of their school uniform.

However, the recent ruling on the ACLU’s case, courtesy of a North Carolina judge could change that.

“The skirts requirement causes the girls to suffer a burden the boys do not, simply because they are female,” wrote US District Judge Malcolm Harris on March 28 in response to the 2016 ACLU lawsuit against the Charter Day School in Leland.

“In the year 2016, I don’t think anyone should have a problem with young women wearing pants,” said Burks in the ACLU post. “There are so many professional women – businesswomen, doctors, and world leaders – who wear pants every day.”

Judge Harris found no merit to the school’s claims supporting the sexist uniform rules, slamming the policy in his ruling.

“The plaintiffs in this case have shown that the girls are subject to a specific clothing requirement that renders them unable to play as freely during recess, requires them to sit in an uncomfortable manner in the classroom, causes them to be overly focused on how they are sitting, distracts them from learning, and subjects them to cold temperatures on their legs and/or uncomfortable layers of leggings under their knee-length skirts in order to stay warm, especially moving outside between classrooms at the school,” he wrote. “Defendants have offered no evidence of any comparable burden on boys.”

While parents were supportive of the ruling, they were a little disturbed by the fact that getting the policy changed required an intervention by the legal system. “We're happy the court agrees," one of mothers, Bonnie Peltier, explained in a statement provided by the ACLU, "but it's disappointing that it took a court order to force the school to accept the simple fact that, in 2019, girls should have the choice to wear pants."

Hopefully this ruling will inspire other schools with similarly old-fashioned dress codes to reconsider their own policies, giving young women the same opportunities to dress as comfortably as their male counterparts. Gender equality may still have a long way to go, but giving young women the right to wear clothing on par with young men in 2019 should be a no-brainer.