Link Banana

It was the best title I could muster… Nicholas Kristof wrote a column yesterday that mentioned a test I’d never tried. (I would have linked to it yesterday, but the site was New York Times‘d.) You’re shown black and white men holding either guns or cellphones. You’re supposed to shoot those with guns and holster your weapon for those with a cellphone. It’s goal is to test if your response times differ because the men’s race. Such a difference is seen as proof of an “implicit” bias that you probably didn’t know you had. It’s the same purpose as these tests, which I had seen before.

Harriet Rubin takes a look — I’d like to say hard-hitting, but it hardly feels accurate — at sexual inequality in the workplace. Then, perhaps, this is the reason for it’s squishiness:

This has been the hardest assignment I have ever had. For more than a decade, I’ve covered gender and power in the business world. I’ve analyzed heroes and villains, sinners and saints, and the rest of us in between. I’ve never had so much trouble getting people to talk to me. Nobody really wanted to get into it. Not even the people who would seem to have the most to say. In fact, those people especially would rather not mention it at all.

(via Slate)

I don’t often read — never mind like — the editorials of newspaper’s editorial boards. But the New York Time’s argument for Senator Kennedy’s civil rights bills made an interesting and troubling argument that the right’s distaste for “judicial activism” only applies to decision they dislike.

One of the most troubling rulings was in the case of Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant who was paid less than her male colleagues after she was given smaller raises over several years. The court’s conservative majority ruled that Ms. Ledbetter had not met the 180-day deadline to file her complaint. It insisted that the 180 days ran from the day the company had made the original decision to give her a smaller raise than the men.

The ruling made no sense, since Ms. Ledbetter was being discriminated against when she made her complaint. As a practical matter, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in a strongly worded dissent, it would have been exceptionally difficult for Ms. Ledbetter to complain when she was first given a lower raise than the male supervisors because Goodyear, like many employers, kept salaries and raises confidential. […]

Conservatives like to say that the court’s conservative justices believe in applying the law, not making it. But in recent years, the court’s majority has been reading federal anti-discrimination laws far more narrowly than Congress intended — not applying the law, but unmaking it.

Bob Herbert’s column for today (rapidly becoming yesterday) argues that American culture is still sweepingly misogynistic. It’s a point that’s worth giving a minute, even if you disagree heartily.

If there was ever a story that deserved more coverage by the news media, it’s the dark persistence of misogyny in America. Sexism in its myriad destructive forms permeates nearly every aspect of American life. For many men, it’s the true national pastime, much bigger than baseball or football.