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The first all-female spacewalk takes place March 29th
After several decades of human spaceflight, you're finally going to see the first all-female spacewalk. NASA has confirmed that astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch will venture outside the International Space Station on March 29th. This wasn't intentional, the agency told Axios -- it just so happened that the particular crew aboard the ISS led to the team-up. If you've been following the progression of the space program, however, it might not be quite such a surprise.
Google won't pull controversial Saudi government app
App store curators frequently have to walk a fine line when deciding what to ban, and Google is proof positive of this. The internet giant told California Rep. Jackie Speier that it wouldn't ban Saudi Arabia's Absher app from Google Play despite calls from Speier and other members of Congress to remove it. The mobile software lets Saudi men control and track travel permissions for women and migrant workers, leading to an outcry that Google and Apple were promoting "sixteenth century tyranny." However, Google determined that Absher didn't violate its agreements and could remain on the store.
Health and beauty tech continues to fail pregnant women
There's a thread on Fitbit's Feature Suggestion forum titled, "Add Pregnancy/Nursing mode for more accurate calorie estimates," with the first comment logged in December 2013. It was locked at 328 comments and 1,388 upvotes. In the comments, hundreds of women chimed in to agree and add their own requests, including tweaks to Fitbit's menstruation-tracking features, nursing settings, weight-gain monitoring and other pregnancy-specific notifications. A moderator lurked, editing labels and updating the status of the request. At 4:41PM on May 6th, 2014, a moderator updated the pregnancy-feature thread to "New." By February 14th, 2015, the status had shifted to, "Not currently planned."
Study: Women are abused every 30 seconds on Twitter
Earlier this year Amnesty International released a report discussing what many of Twitter's female users already know: the social network is not always a great place to be if you're a woman. Now, a new study reveals the hard statistics on just how toxic the situation is. According to the report by Amnesty International and global AI software company Element AI, female journalists and politicians were abused every 30 seconds on Twitter in 2017.
Intel says its staff is now representative of the US 'skilled workforce'
In 2015, Intel made a $300 million commitment to ensuring its workforce accurately represents the US skilled labor market, particularly with regards to women and underrepresented minorities (African-American, Hispanic and Native American people). It originally aimed to meet this target by 2020, before moving the timeframe up to 2018 last year. It now claims it has achieved that goal.
California requires companies to include women on their boards
On Sunday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill into law that will require publicly traded companies headquartered in the state to have women on their boards of directors. As per the law, by the end of next year, these companies must include at least one woman on their boards and by 2021, they'll be required to have up to three depending on how many directors make up their boards. Those found to be in violation of the law will initially be fined $100,000, and subsequent violations will result in fines of $300,000.
FDA says unapproved 'designer vagina' treatments are dangerous
Cellulite, thigh gaps, hip dips... women have no end of supposed physical "flaws" to worry about, and in recent times this remit has expanded to include the state of their vaginas, too. The internet is awash with products designed to improve a woman's "intimate health", but now the FDA has found that these treatments and procedures -- which claim to tighten muscles, increase lubrication, boost sexual pleasure or just "neaten things up" -- are not only unapproved, but are causing serious injuries to the women undertaking them.
Fitbit's period-tracking features are seriously lacking
Fitbit wants to help women stay on top of their cycles. It added a "female health tracking" feature to its app two months ago, which puts data about periods and ovulation alongside your other metrics. Although there are plenty of period and fertility tracking apps available, having Fitbit keep all that information in the same place as the stuff it already knows about you should be both convenient and illuminating.
Labor board says Google legally fired diversity memo writer
James Damore may claim Google was wrong to fire him over his memo criticizing the company's diversity culture, but a federal government overseer begs to differ. The National Labor Relations Board has published a January memo recommending a dismissal of Damore's then-active complaint. Board attorney Jayme Sophir found that Damore was protected under federal law when he criticized Google, but that he wasn't protected when he suggested that women were biologically inferior at programming. His remarks were likely to create "serious dissension and disruption" in the workplace, Sophir said, and that actuallly happened -- women pulled their candidacy for engineering positions after hearing of Damore's memo.
Uber will donate $5 million to sexual assault prevention
Uber's quest to reform its behavior now includes donations to good causes. The ridesharing firm has promised to contribute $5 million over 5 years to organizations that help prevent sexual assault and domestic violence. The initial round of pledges will go to groups like A Call to Men, the National Network to End Domestic Violence and NO MORE, with a focus on tackling "critical funding gaps" in marginalized communities.
Natural Cycles says contraceptive app is more effective than the pill
Contraceptive app Natural Cycles is more effective than the pill, according to the latest and largest study into the app's efficacy. After testing 22,785 women throughout 224,563 menstrual cycles, the startup found the app provided 99 percent contraceptive effectiveness if used perfectly. If used "typically", the app was 93 percent effective. The contraceptive pill, meanwhile, is 91 percent effective.
Intel's diversity report shows slow growth for women and minorities
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich condemned hate speech and white supremacy on Twitter after the horrifying events in Charlottesville this weekend. On Monday, he resigned from Trump's American Manufacturing Council to "call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues..." Now, alongside a mid-year diversity report that documents some slow and flat growth in diversity at Intel, Krzanich is touting his company's "fast march" toward the full representation of women and unrepresented minorities in Intel's US-based workforce by 2018. That's only one year away.
Facebook is slowly becoming less white and less male
Facebook's latest diversity stats are in, and it seems that while the process is glacially-slow, the company is becoming less white and less male. In the last year, the number of women in tech has risen from 17% to 19%, with women accounting for 27% of all new graduate hires in engineering and 21% of all new technical hires. The number of Hispanics at the company has increased from 4% to 5%, while the number of black people has risen from 2% to 3%. These figures don't represent a particularly impressive move forward from last year, but they are in many cases much better than they were in 2014. According to a blog post by the company, much of this "success" can be attributed to a range of diversity-focused programs, designed to eradicate the White Boys' Club mentality that has long-plagued Facebook's boardrooms.
Google wins fight with Labor Department over pay gap data
Google appears to have emerged mostly triumphant in its fight with the Department of Labor over supplying pay gap data. An administrative law judge has ruled that the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs overstepped its boundaries by asking for as much data as it did when trying to address reported pay disparities between men and women. According to the decision, the OFCCP's requests were "intrusive on employee privacy, unduly burdensome and insufficiently focused." To put it succinctly, the Office couldn't justify why it needed as much info as it wanted.
In astronomy, women of color face the most discrimination
There's tons of evidence that women face a gender bias in the STEM fields. Last May, one report found that Facebook rejects female-authored code more often than code written by men. A female engineer who featured prominently in a recruiting advertisement faced a backlash for her gender alone. Even US governors are taking up the fight to get more girls interested in science and engineering because it's crucial to the field and the national economy. Unfortunately, a study by Girls Who Code found that the gender gap in computing is getting worse. The bad news continues with results from a new study that show women of color working in the astronomical and planetary fields experience "the highest rates of negative workplace experiences, including harassment and assault."
The evolution of women in video games continues at E3 2017
Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian tries to make it clear that her yearly, gender-focused analysis of the video games announced at E3 isn't founded in malice -- it's a mathematical reality. Even in 2017, video games overwhelmingly feature male protagonists rather than female leads. According to Feminist Frequency, 109 games debuted at E3 this year, and just eight of them (or 7 percent) star female characters, compared with 29 titles (26 percent) featuring male protagonists. Fifty-two percent of newly announced games utilize a system that lets players select specific characters or genders. On their own, these statistics aren't bad or good; they're simply facts. "We're not trying to be bummers," Sarkeesian said on the Engadget stage at E3. "But it's like, let's look at the actual numbers so we can actually improve for real."
UploadVR sued for ‘rampant’ sexism, general awfulness
UploadVR is the workplace that has everything, at least if you enjoy walking around an office with condom wrappers on the floor. That's just one of many charges being leveled against it by its former director of digital and social media in a recent lawsuit. She alleges that the company was a hotbed of "rampant" sexism and that its co-founders created a toxic working environment for women.
Scientists recreate the female menstrual cycle on a chip
Scientists don't understand as much as they'd like about the female reproductive system, both due to their historical exclusion from studies and the challenge in replicating the complexities of that anatomy. At last, however, there's progress. Researchers have developed an organ on a chip that models a woman's entire reproductive system, including menstruation and hormone-induced responses. It clearly doesn't look like the real thing (see above), but numerous key behaviors are present.
Uber is just as white and male as every other tech company
Uber is aware that its culture needs to change, and that means understanding what its culture is. To that end, the ridesharing giant has posted its first-ever diversity report... and it's clear that the company suffers from the same homogeneity problems as its tech industry peers. Women represent 36.1 percent of its global workforce, and that number plunges to 15.4 percent when you look at technical roles. And not surprisingly, there's not a lot of cultural variety. In the US, just under half (49.8 percent) of Uber employees are white, while 30.9 percent are Asian. And those figures are exaggerated at the top -- 22 percent of executives are women, and 76.7 percent of them are white.
Marine Corps guidelines now ban online sexual harassment
The US Marine Corps has already started to crack down on soldiers sharing nude photos of women soldiers through internet groups, but it now has a better way of tackling this behavior. The military branch has published updated guidelines that explicitly forbid various forms of online sexual harassment, including "indecent viewing, visual recording, or broadcasting." Marines represent the Corps and their units "at all times," and that includes when they post on social networks.