Who doesn’t love a public market?
After all, they provide a great opportunity to buy local food, expanding your culinary tastes in the process. But despite our adoration for these markets, we may not realize the full impact they have on the people working the booth. Elijah Anderson, a Yale sociologist, coined Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market a “cosmopolitan canopy” because it is a place of equal opportunity for all genders and ethnicities. Philadelphia is not alone, though, as public markets across the country give everyone the chance to succeed.
Public markets are on the rise again, as noted by Project for Public Spaces (PPS), who found that the number of farmer’s markets increased from 2,863 in 2000 to 7,175 in 2011. The rise can be attributed partly to the help of organizations that assist in linking farmers with land — many of whom are minorities.
FARMroots is one such group. Since its formation in 2000, it has been connecting Latin American immigrants with land in New York State. Recently, they have expanded into the city, supporting urban farms, a growing industry. This is possible through partnerships with Black Urban Group and second-career farms, which are run mainly by women. In addition to minorities, women are also new titans in the sustainable agricultural business. So far this year, FARMroots has helped raise and market 20 new farm businesses.
Further, farmers are also doing business with SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program) customers, resulting in increased small business development and food access.
These initiatives aren’t limited to just the Northeast though. PPS has recently been working with a Hmong population in Missouri. Originally from Minnesota, the transition was rough due to a different growing season and less interest in Asian foods. However, with the help of a grant from the Kellogg Foundation through PPS, these Hmong farmers have been given another chance, with a grant that allowed them to participate in training sessions — resulting in sales increases ranging from 200 to 800 percent.
Although these minority and women farmers may experience some discrimination, overall public markets give them the chance to expand their businesses and improve their lives. Therefore, next time you drop by a farmer’s market, realize that not only are you helping yourself, but you are benefiting the lives of those selling to you, too.
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Tag: women
When These Low-Income Women Needed Help, They Found an Answer in Each Other
For all the recent innovation and developments in technology and more, it’s easy to forget that some of the best ideas for solving national challenges are relics of the past.
That’s the case with Black Women’s Blueprint, a network for women to barter for goods and services that also runs a sou-sou, or money pool, an ancient savings technique through which the members of the pool each contribute a monthly amount of cash and take turns receiving the lump sum. Through this service, Black Women’s Blueprint strives to elevate the lives of black women socially and economically.
The group is run by Farah Tanis, a woman who has spent her life helping people, from working with refugees living with HIV in New York City to serving on the board of Girls for Gender Equity, an organization that seeks to provide comprehensive development to girls and women. These roles, combined with her many projects focused on combatting domestic violence, led her to be named a U.S. Human Rights Institute fellow in 2012.
“Through our barter network we were able to barter food for the week, for a car ride for the week, and that’s what sustained many of us,” Tanis said on a panel discussion sponsored by GRITtv. “It prevented homelessness, starvation and kids being left at home alone by themselves. The barter network builds community and it builds trust.”
Tanis told Laura Flanders of Yes! Magazine that the idea came to her when she was talking with a group of low-income women about the challenges they faced. “Most of us had grown up in poverty and we started looking at what were the systemic causes of poverty for us. We started looking at economic security as a human right and an extension of the Civil Rights.”
As Black Women’s Blueprint’s barter network proves, sometimes the best ideas are the old ones.
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Dads, Let Your Daughters See You Wash the Dishes
Who would’ve guessed that men doing housework could help determine your child’s success?
Alyssa Croft, a Ph.D. candidate in the University of British Columbia’s Department of Psychology, conducted a study whose results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science. The findings? Girls who see their fathers pitching in on house chores — i.e. washing the dishes — are more likely to aspire to non-traditional careers like scientists or business leaders.
The researchers interviewed parents asking about their beliefs in gender roles and how they divided chores around the house. They also spoke with daughters about gender roles and what careers they could see themselves having in the future.
Croft found that the mothers’ and fathers’ ideas about gender roles did influence their daughters’ beliefs, but that a stronger predictor of what the girls wanted to be as adults was the division of domestic labor at home.
The daughters responded according to the dads’ actions, not their words. Girls with fathers who didn’t help with household chores were more likely to want traditional female careers such as stay-at-home-moms, teachers, nurses, or librarians. Those who saw their fathers helping clean, cook, and watch the kids dreamed of a broader set of jobs that were often higher-paying than those in woman-dominated fields.
“It’s very important for fathers to not only talk the talk about gender roles, but also to walk the walk, because their daughters seem to be watching.” Croft says in a YouTube video explaining the study.
“Despite our best efforts to try to create workplace equality, women remain severely under-represented in leadership and management positions,” Croft told the Association for Psychological Science. “This study is important because it suggests that achieving gender equality at home may be one way to inspire young women to set their sights on careers from which they have traditionally been excluded.”
So moms, let the dads clear the table tonight. Your daughter will thank you for it in the future.
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How ‘The Golden Girls’ Can Help Solve a Problem Facing Senior Women
“The Golden Girls” went off the air in 1992, but many of us still remember the show about four senior women sharing a home in Miami, in part because there hasn’t been anything else like it on T.V.
It turns out “The Golden Girls” was ahead of its time in more ways than one, and that its model of communal living—with some good-natured bickering thrown in—might provide a solution to a problem facing millions of Baby Boomer women as they reach retirement age. One third of Baby Boomer women live alone, and 50.8 percent of the 78.2 million Boomers in America are women. Many of these single women are divorced, a situation that often leaves their finances in disarray as they head into retirement.
According to the PBS NewsHour, the median income of senior women in Minneapolis was $11,000 less than that for men, which gave Connie Skillingstad an idea. She runs Golden Girl Homes, Inc., which helps match older women in the Twin Cities with others who’d like to reduce loneliness and split expenses by sharing a home. She told Spencer Michels of the NewsHour that each of the women who band together as roommates offers some asset that can help the others. “For example, there are women who have no money, but they have a house. They have space and they can share it with somebody, and it will help them to survive,” she said.
Karen Bush, Louise Machinist, and Jean McQuillan are longtime friends in their 60s, each of them divorced, who now share houses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sarasota, Florida. The women reach agreements about cooking, cleaning, finances, and what to do should any of them fall ill. They have legal documents in place stipulating what would happen if any of them are no longer able to take care of themselves. Together, they’re renovating their Florida condo to allow them to age in place. Bush told Michels, “The whole setup that we have here is going to help me be independent for a long time. And at the point at which I can no longer be independent, I will have additional resources to pay for what I need.”
Half a million women over the age of 50 in America live with roommates who are not romantic partners. Now this sounds like a case of smart women banding together to solve their own problems. Could a sitcom be next?
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Born in Prison Herself, She’s Helping Women Break the Incarceration Cycle
If you believe your tween and teen years were difficult, think again.
When she was just 11 years old, Deborah Jiang Stein discovered a letter containing an explosive secret that her adoptive parents hid from her. The letter detailed the fact that Jiang Stein was born not only to an incarcerated mother, but addicted to heroin herself. Plus, she learned that she spent the first year of her life behind bars.
Traumatized by this revelation, Jiang Stein led tumultuous teenage years during which she was addicted to drugs, committed robberies and smuggled drugs. When she witnessed an acquaintance stab a man, Jiang Stein vowed to turn her life around. And she did just that — reconnecting with her adoptive parents, earning a college degree, and writing the memoirs Even Tough Girls Wear Tutus: Inside the World of a Woman Born in Prison and Prison Baby.
Jiang Stein’s birth in prison is sadly, not unusual — according to Sherry Amatenstein of TruthAtlas, seven to 10 percent of all incarcerated women are pregnant, and 70 percent of the children of incarcerated women one day end up in prison themselves. According to Jiang Stein’s website, three percent of American kids have a parent in prison.
Jiang Stein, who is now in her fifties, has dedicated her life to connecting with imprisoned women and teaching them they have value and can still turn their lives around. She travels the country giving seminars and leading writing workshops for incarcerated females. “Women in prison are a disappeared group, and the majority is sentenced for substance abuse and domestic violence offenses,” she told Amatenstein. “I want people to notice these women are not scary. They are wounded human beings who need compassion and life tools.”
In 2012, Jiang Stein founded The unPrison Project, a nonprofit whose goal is “to empower, inspire, and cultivate critical thinking, life skills, self-reflection, and peer mentoring for women and girls in prison.” She presents workshops in prisons across the country and plans to expand her nonprofit’s mission to offer “Mother Mail” — packets of letters and artwork sent from schoolchildren to their moms in prison. She aims to provide incarcerated women with goal planners they can use to advance their education and help with substance abuse treatment. She also wants to connect formerly incarcerated women to assistance with jobs, housing, and parenting. Jiang Stein told Amatenstein, “Prison is my birth country. Going back has freed me.” And now her work is freeing other women too.
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It’s a Woman’s World Now, and Women Are Making It Better for Everyone
In the past few years, coding has taken on a life of its own and is seen almost as a universal digital gateway to a lucrative career. Kimberly Bryant, a biotech engineer, is harnessing the power of code education through Black Girls Code, a non-profit organization she launched in 2011. In just three years, it’s become so successful that CNN just named Bryant to its CNN 10: Visionary Women list.
The idea came to Bryant when her 12-year-old daughter, a heavy gamer, found herself as the only girl of color at a weeklong computer programming camp at Stanford University in California. Her daughter’s experience was all too familiar: In the 1980s, Bryant was the only African-American woman in her electrical engineering classes, and to this day, she still finds herself completely outnumbered in her field.
Black Girls Code aims to not only amend the dearth of black women in the technology industry workforce —they make up only 3 percent — but to turn the face of the industry on its head.
“We don’t want to just teach the girls to code,” said Bryant, who now works full-time for the nonprofit. “We also want to teach them to create businesses and to become business owners and become like the next Mark Zuckerberg or the next Bill Gates.”
To do so, the organization teaches computer programming and entrepreneurial skills to girls of color, ages seven to 17, attempting to train them to become tech leaders of the future. The program goes far beyond Bryant’s home base in San Francisco, reaching 2,500 girls through chapters in seven U.S. cities and in Johannesburg, South Africa. Eight additional chapters across the country are planned for 2014, with the goal of reaching 1 million girls by 2040.
“We like to say we hope to be like the Girl Scouts of technology, having many different chapters in many different states, as well as many different countries,” Bryant told CNN.
“I’m doing something to make the world a better place for her child,” she adds.
Bryant’s goal to foster a global atmosphere of female success echoes the stories of the rest of the members of the CNN 10: Visionary Women list.
In honor of Women’s History Month, which lasts all of March, CNN told the stories of 10 women working to help other women through education, emotional support, and career motivation. They’re all working toward that goal via unique paths. Victoria Budson, executive director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, is shattering the wage gap through data-driven means like a gender action portal and professional partnerships. Molly Cantrell-Kraig founded the Women With Drive Foundation to provide transportation to women who otherwise find education and job training inaccessible. Other women included are making fashion-forward clothing for Muslim women and teaching women about menstruation.
“What they have in common is a mission to empower their fellow woman,” CNN wrote in the introduction. And what Bryant, along with the others, represents is a passionate commitment to training the next generation of female leaders.
Inside the Push for Equality in the Gaming Industry
Add gaming to the list of male-dominated industries. Despite the exploding popularity of this medium across demographics — according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project and Mills College survey, 97 percent of American teens aged 12 to 17 play video games at least two hours a week — women make up only 13 percent of the employees in the gaming industry. And that includes business positions, not just creative jobs like the coveted role of video game designer. Additionally, women in this industry are paid an average of 25 percent less than men. What gives?
According to Dr. Mary Flanagan, an award-winning game designer, researcher,and professor at Dartmouth College, the underlying problem is that the industry still exudes “a culture of virtual guns, babes and ammo … and spoils what could otherwise be a revolutionary design space for new kinds of thinking, learning and collaboration, if only the industry would diversify.” In short, she writes in Gamasutra (the online version of Game Developer Magazine), the gender disparity is the last thing that the industry wants to “deal with.” She writes, “No one wants to ask development teams to self- censor. What if that hurts creativity? Why deal with this at all? Wouldn’t it be easier to just avoid women altogether?”
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But Flanagan argues that this issue should be “dealt with,” for the betterment of the industry. Not only is it proven that women can design great video games (and other games as well), but in general, Flanagan argues, the industry would benefit from teams that include a variety of opinions and ideas from different demographics.
In fact, gaming was arguably created by a woman, Anne W. Abbott, who designed the first board game published in the U.S. in 1843. Other iconic American games, such as Jenga, Monopoly, Portal, and Centipede, were also created by women. And the Alien Game project has proven that games that are created by women have a broader appeal across genders, which equals greater sales and profits for businesses.
Flanagan is pushing to revolutionize the gaming industry by making it gender equal by 2020. To do that, she says that women in the industry need to speak up and make their presence known. She recommends that these women visit schools or host a panel at a gaming conference to prove to young women and girls that they, too, can become game designers. But the men can also help, by pushing for equality on industry panels and in the workplace. After all, diversity is good for business. “If we add more diverse voices to the video game industry, we will create vastly different games that reflect a diversity of thought and social values,” Flanagan writes. “Bring us different games, those that inspire, teach, entertain and open minds.” And bring in the women.
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Will Mentorship Bring More Diversity to STEM Fields?
We’ve all heard the statistics. Women, by and large, are disproportionately underrepresented in STEM fields. According to recent research from employment website LinkedIn, women make up just 30 percent of the entire workforce in the tech industry. The statistics in engineering are even worse. Only 15 percent of jobs in this high-paying, highly-competitive field are held by women. It’s a familiar story with no simple solutions.
As Fast Company’s Chris Gayomali points out, “The gender imbalance in STEM fields is a deeply rooted structural problem, from the actual hiring process to the education system responsible for churning out the future’s workforce.” But there are ways to ease the imbalance. And one strategy, experts claim, is through mentorship.
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Last week, MentorNet, an organization that has paired more than 32,000 STEM students with mentors in the field over the past 15 years, announced that it was partnering with LinkedIn in order to expand its reach by utilizing their expansive professional social media platform to connect students — called protégés — with STEM professionals. This partnership allows MentorNet to leverage LinkedIn’s network of more than 277 million professional to find mentors who would be interested in the program. (Additionally, LinkedIn is providing MentorNet with a grant that will allow the organization to update its own technology platform to reach even more people.) Currently, Meg Garlinghouse, Head of LinkedIn Good, wrote in a blog post that the protégés greatly outnumber the mentors.
“LinkedIn is this rich profile for education, employment, and where people are in the world,” Mary Fernandez, MentorNet CEO, told Fast Company. “We can combine that with the data for our program, and once you understand the challenges people are facing, once you have this really rich profile, you can begin to match mentors and protégés algorithmically.”
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But good news is often offset with bad. Research shows that while the number of women in STEM degree programs is increasing — the National Science Board’s recent report found that the number is up 21 percent since 1993 — the number of degree-holders in these areas has actually declined over the past 30 years, from 23 percent in 1984 to fewer than 15 percent today. For its part, MentorNet’s mission of mentorship has proven to work: 92 percent of the program’s protégés have gone on to graduate, according to Fast Company.
Fernandez herself experienced the positive effects of mentorship when she was hired at AT&T Bell Labs while in graduate school at Princeton University. For her, the experience was invaluable. She even attributes it to helping her earn her Ph.D. Now, her mission is to help other young women find the support they need to be successful, which in turn can positively impact the nation’s economy.
“There’s an economic imperative for more diversity,” she said, noting that hiring managers couldn’t ignore a talent pool full of smart, educated women. “Women have to be part of the story. Latinos have to be part of the story. First-generation college attendees have to be part of the story.” And LinkedIn and MentorNet is rewriting it now.
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Why Are These Female Scientists Tweeting Photos of Their Manicures?
Hope Jahren runs the geobiology lab at the University of Hawaii Manoa that bears her name, The Jahren Lab, where scientists study things like the carbon isotope composition of terrestrial land plants. But just because Jahren is brainy, it doesn’t mean she can’t also enjoy showing off her manicure. Jahren noticed that Seventeen magazine regularly invites its readers to share a photo of their nails on Twitter with the hashtag #ManicureMonday. Jahren thought, why not invite female scientists to contribute to this Twitter hashtag in the hopes of changing girls’ perceptions of what it means to be a scientist?
She tweeted her idea and it took off, attracting such manicure photos as that of Sarah Hörst, working on a post-doctorate in Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, who posed her glossy planet-themed nail next to a tiny model of the Mars Rover. Jahren recently tweeted a photo of herself holding a dish of algal infections, which she described as “the bane of our existence here in @JahrenLab.” Other scientists posted photos of their nails gripping beakers or ferns or measuring fossils or accessorizing with leaf insect nymphs.
Young women checking out the Seventeen hashtag responded by tweeting questions to the scientists, and just may have had their minds changed about what a typical scientist looks like. Jahren told Laura Vanderkam of USA Today, “I like to have pretty nails and cute shoes and makeup and dresses, and I do care about the way I look. But I am also very serious about my science, and these two things are not incompatible.” The scientist manicure photos, which continue to appear, sound like a fun Twitter game that just might get girls to consider the important academic field.
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This Photographer Is on a Mission to Make People Rethink What Makes a Woman Successful
Denver photographer Suzanne Heintz, a self-described “spinster,” hauls mannequins all over the world to pose in self-portraits that she hopes will have people rethinking how they view single women.
Heintz was tired of people asking whether she was going to ever get married and have kids, according to Jenna Garrett of Feature Shoot. In her ongoing project “Life Once Removed,” Heintz depicts herself with an ecstatic smile enjoying a cup of coffee in a café with her second-hand mannequin husband, standing with him and a mannequin daughter in front of the Eiffel Tower, delirious with joy, serving them Christmas dinner, and hauling them on a toboggan up a mountain.
Heintz told Garrett, “For women, the path to fulfillment is not through one thing, it’s all things—education, career, home, family, accomplishment, enlightenment. If any one of those things is left out, it’s often perceived that there’s something wrong with your life. We are somehow never enough just as we are. We are constantly set up by our expectations to feel as though we are missing something.”
“I’m simply trying to get people to open up their minds and quit clinging to antiquated notions of what a successful life looks like,” she said. And her photos just might do that, while giving everyone a laugh.
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