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Albany, NY – The variety of attitudes towards the female gender in news articles is amazing. Once you start looking, you can see sexist behavior lurking everywhere. But suspicion of gender discrimination can become a crutch.
Some criticize Hillary Clinton supporters for using that crutch as Clinton appears to be falling behind Barack Obama in her campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. So we ask the question: Is sexism a factor in the race? While we don't have time for a definitive answer, we did find a strong argument that there is sexism in the presidential race.
In a recent Washington Post column, longtime political reporter Marie Cocco gathered the most extreme attacks on Clinton as a woman. She calls the piece Misogyny I won't Miss. Some of Cocco's observations are astonishing - T-shirts for male Obama supporters bearing the slogan Bros before Hos, television pundits likening Clinton to a she-devil, the list goes on and on. I asked Marie Cocco why she chose to write the column.
Sticking to our theme of asking questions about sexism, let's move on to this one: can fear of sexism become its own barrier?
Sports writer Michael Sokolove would say yes. He spent years investigating female high school athletes and their high rates of injury. He found that in many cases, rates of injury are higher for young women than young men. Sokolove put his findings into a book, and recently published a shorter version under the title Hurt Girls in the New York Times Magazine. He was flooded with response to the Hurt Girls article - much of it in the form of outrage from women, arguing that his exposure of these injuries could damage Title IX's progress in including girls in high school sports over the past 30 years.
So, we called Sokolove to see why he decided to defy opposition and talk about high school sports injuries for young women.
It's time for our third question about sexism: Is it ever ok to embrace a gendered tradition? Susan Marine is director of Harvard University's Women's Center - and she's used to pondering gender issues. But when it came to her wedding, she ran up against a doozy.