Media Diversity Forum: Home

Marvel comics introducing a Muslim girl superhero

Marvel via The New York Times

Source: Marvel via The New York Times

By George Gene Gustines
(Nov. 6, 2013 | The New York Times) - With most superheroes, when you take away the colorful costume, mask and cape, what you find underneath is a white man. But not always. In February, as part of a continuing effort to diversify its offerings, Marvel Comics will begin a series whose lead character, Kamala Khan, is a teenage Muslim girl living in Jersey City. Read more

Comedy needs more female writers

Roma activist Angela Kocze fights media stereotypes

By Lynn Joyce Hunter
(Nov. 5, 2013 | The Washington Post) - “If it’s not careful, the media can sustain centuries-old stereotypes about Roma,” says Roma activist Dr. Angela Kocze, referring to recent news stories about the removal of blonde-haired, fair-skinned children from their darker-complected Roma parents in Greece and Ireland. Read more

We take female broadcasters for granted now, but their fight to be heard was not easy

By Miranda Sawyer
(Nov. 2, 2013 | The Guardian) - "You forget," said my mum, "how bad it was, really." We were talking after the first of Jane Garvey's programmes about women in broadcasting, Getting on Air: The Female Pioneers. My mum was born in 1938. When she married, in 1962, she wasn't allowed her own bank account or a mortgage in her name.

She wasn't treated as a fully responsible adult, despite being the sole wage earner (my dad was studying) and, then and now, being the only person in the Sawyer household guaranteed to pay all bills on time, to have an informed opinion on every single item on the news and to never, ever forget to vote. Read more

We need more women in tech: The data prove it

Source: Reuters

By Derek Khanna
(Oct. 29, 2013 | The Atlantic) - Across the technology sector there is a major disparity between men and women.

While 57 percent of occupations in the workforce are held by women, in computing occupations that figure is only 25 percent. Of chief information officer jobs (CIOs) at Fortune 250 companies, 20 percent were held by a woman in 2012. Read more

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New center at Indiana University aims to boost women in technology

Study: Men and women both tend to stare at women with objectifying gazes

Source: WIA Report

(Oct. 30, 2013 | WIA Report) - Researchers at the University of Nebraska used sophisticated eye-tracking technology to record where test subject eyes focused when they were shown images of women. As may come as no surprise to many readers, men tended to look first at the breasts of the women in the images and they spent more time looking at breasts than at other parts of the image. Read more

Gender News/Articles Round-Up (Nov. 2, 2013)

Jezebel: from blog to book (The Guardian, Oct. 28, 2013)

Gender-nonconforming children need empathy, not the media spotlight (Time, Sept. 3, 2013)

Women start to crack into Israeli film industry (The Daily Beast, Oct. 17, 2013)

Page by page, men are stepping into the “Lean-In” circle (The New York Times, Nov. 3, 2013)

Women add lawsuit to Title IX complaint alleging school failed to protect women (The Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2013)

Ottawa professor: Women evolved to talk smack about each other< (The Washington Post, Oct. 31, 2013)

Women's magazines and sites should stop giving science-denying wackadoodles a platform (The Guardian, Nov. 1, 2013)

Robyn Lawley: Why the dangerous “Thigh Gap” trend makes me mad (The Daily Beast, Oct. 28, 2013)

The Western crusade to rescue Muslim women has reduced them to a simplistic stereotype (Time, Nov. 1, 2013)

When men stop seeking beauty and women care less about wealth (Sept. 7, 2012)

Gender