MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Women notch a win in battle for equality”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, January 27, 2012
Who says going to war isn’t women’s work?
Probably the same person who said women don’t belong in the executive suite and college is still a boys’ club. Good luck selling those old fictions to a generation of ambitious women. It turns out a woman’s place is in the House, the Senate AND the foxhole.
You want to know how swiftly gender stereotypes are collapsing? Don’t focus only on Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and his big decision to end the military’s ban on women in combat. That was certainly historic. But the Pentagon’s a lagging indicator this time.
The new Senate has 20 women, the most in history. The House has 81, counting three nonvoting members, also a record. Glass ceilings keep being shatter
ed in law, medicine and corporate life. Though far more men still hold partner, chairman and CEO titles, women are flooding the ranks right beneath them. And one expects the next battle cry to be: “Whoa! That’s high enough!”
Progress like this always comes in fits and starts. Women’s wages still trail men’s, though some of that comes from choosing flextime mommy tracks. And in success, backsliding is always a possibility, as Barack Obama is learning now. He was widely praised for an integrated first-term cabinet until Hillary Rodham Clinton (State) and Hilda Solis (Labor) started packing their bags with no female replacements in sight.
But if education is the future — and it is — young women are romping there. The gender gap on campus has grown so wide, men will soon be demanding their own Title IX for the classroom.
In 1840, Catherine Brewer Benson became the first American woman to graduate from college. By 1982, more women than men were graduating from college. Today, women walk off with nearly 60 percent of oddly named bachelor’s degrees, up from one-third in 1960. Increasingly they’re also the ones earning the top grades and running the extracurricular groups.
In an ongoing war for women’s equality, the combat zone was only the latest battlefield.
FANCY FOOTWORK
1. Pumps
2. Sandals
3. Sling backs
4. Stilettos
5. Army boots
THE NEWS IN SONG
James Brown was certain:
“It’s a Man’s World”
It was.
ASKED AND UNSWERED
Any second thoughts inside the FBI about slapping runaway Hauppauge mom Yvette Torres on the Most Wanted List? Twelve years later, she’s back from Spain and facing no charges at all…Copper wire, disability payments—what else 
will LIRR workers be accused of stealing? I mean besides the riders’ time…Does the ex-Nassau exec have a secret hand in Let’sConvinceTomSuozzi.com? Or is the new run-again-Tom Web site, with its ominous Ed Mangano soundtrack, strictly a grass-roots affair?…It’s a local-crowd hot ticket at the Huntington Cinema Arts Centre. Now will Lucy Winer’s journey-back docu-film “Kings Park: Stories from an American Mental Institution” get the national run it deserves?…Who needs long, contentious school-board meetings? Sachem Superintendent James Nolan is now answering questions, harsh and otherwise, via live tweet @SachemSchools…Novocain for the patient, booze for the doc? Suffolk police say Lindenhurst’s dentist Robert Garelick was drilling under the influence…Could a new Cosmos soc
cer stadium at Belmont Park give post-Isles’ LI its pro-sports mojo back? Just imagine the cross-Island rivalries if Flushing Meadows-Corona Park gets a soccer stadium too. LIRR Series, anyone?… Housing bust? In the high-flying Hamptons? Douglas Elliman pegs the average fourth-quarter East End sale at $2,130,788. Ya gotta live somewhere, right.
LONG ISLANDERS OF THE WEEK
Mayuri Sridhar and Michael Zhang
Two of this year’s Intel Science Talent Search finalists are from Long Island: King Park High’s Mayuri Sridhar for “Computational Analysis of the DNA-Binding Mechanism of the p53 Tumor Suppressor and It’s Inactivation through the R249S Mutation” and Smithtown High East’s Michael Zhang who is being recognized for his “Role-Inducted Perspective Visual Behavior during Scene Free-Viewing.” Congrats to them, their families and their teachers, even though I don’t have the slightest clue what any of that means.
E-mail ellis@henican.com
Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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