Melinda Gates' $1 Billion To Advance American Women | Trump Voters Want Women at Home

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Philanthropist Melinda Gates is not sleeping well in Trumplandia. After a decade of watching the erosion of women’s rights and women’s progress in America, Gates has decided to do a very public reality check on the state of American women.

Reality is that 50 years after the second wave of the women’s movement ignited, only one CEO on the list of people running Fortune 500 companies is a woman of color. Gates cites the sobering fact that in 2018, there were more men names James running Fortune 500 companies than women.

Her action plan involves $1 billion spent towards expanding women’s power and influence in America. “There is no reason to believe this moment will last forever,” Gates, founder of investment and incubation company Pivotal Ventures, wrote in a Time.com opinion piece about the women’s marches, #MeToo movement, and the political activism and elections to office for American women.

“Too many people - women and men - have worked too hard to get us this far,” she wrote. “There are too many possible solutions we haven’t tried yet.”

Goals include dismantling barriers to women’s job advancement such as care-giving obligations and sexual harassment and fast-tracking women in influential job sectors such as technology, media and public office. Gates doesn’t

I, too, lie awake at night worrying about this possibility -- and have for a decade. The arrival of the Republican Tea Party in 2010 signaled an awesome erosion of women’s rights that have exploded since Trump became president.

One night I actually had a terrifying nightmare related to women’s access to contraception in America, and this was several years before the dystopian Handmaid Tale became a Hulu hit.

There is no doubt that Republicans are determined to take US women back to the 50s, eliminate all child care support, even public education in an effort to get American women having babies and even home schooling them with the Biblical good book.

I worry that America is increasingly becoming an Arab country -- and I don't mean too many Muslims. I mean too many Republicans wanting a theocracy where a Christian God runs the country, just as Allah and his men culturally and politically run the Muslim countries. The vast majority (over 70% of Trump's women voters and 58% of men) support this vision for America, as evidenced by extensive research done on Trump voters by Baylor Christian University in Waco, Texas. ~ Anne

THE SACRED VALUES OF “TRUMPISM”

Core Values

Researchers looked at how religious values, behaviors and beliefs predicted political support for Trump, finding that the majority of those who voted for him tend to:

  • Say they are “very religious”

  • Are members of white Evangelical Protestant churches

  • View the United States as a Christian nation

  • Believe in an authoritative God who is actively engaged in world affairs

  • See Muslims as threats to America

  • Value gender traditionalism, feeling that men are better suited for politics and should earn more than women; women should provide primary child care; and working women are deficient as mothers

  • Oppose lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights (such as legal marriage)

Empowering Women Is Key To Planned Population Growth in Africa, Educated Citizens, Good Health and Economic Development

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Empowering Women Is Key To Planned Population Growth in Africa, Educated Citizens, Good Health and Economic Development

By Alex Ezeh, Dornsife Professor of Global Health, Drexel University

I think about the future of my continent in terms of three questions: Are Africans healthy? Do they have access to a good education? And do they have opportunities to apply their skills?

Millions more Africans have been able to answer yes to these questions in recent years. But there’s an elephant in the room. One of the keys to keeping this progress going is slowing down the rapid rates of population growth in parts of the continent. But population issues are so difficult to talk about that the development community has been ignoring them for years.

Population growth is a controversial topic because, in the not-too-distant past, some countries tried to control population growth with abusive, coercive policies, including forced sterilization. Now, human rights are again at the centre of the discussion about family planning, where they belong. But as part of repairing the wounds created by this history, population was removed from the development vocabulary altogether.

For the sake of Africa’s future, we should bring it back. Based on current trends, Africa as a whole is projected to double in size by 2050. Between 2050 and 2100, according to the United Nations, it could almost double again. In that case, the continent would have to quadruple its efforts just to maintain the current level of investment in health and education, which is too low already.

But if the rate of population growth slows down there will be more resources to invest in each African’s health, education, and opportunity – in other words, in a good life.

Bill and Melinda Gates Make A Big Move For Women's Global Economic Empowerment

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Bill and Melinda Gates Make A Big Move For Women's Global Economic Empowerment

For over a decade, researchers have known that everything changes in almost every community and country worldwide when women have money. 

On Monday Melinda Gates published an op-ed in Quartz in which she and husband Bill Gates announced a four-year pledge of $170 million to help empower women economically worldwide.

The decision comes at a time when 1) the Gates Foundation has tried to block the damage levied at poor women worldwide by cuts In the US budget that funds global women's health initiatives -- not abortions, but 'yes' to birth control being available at women's health clinics. Generally-speaking, the Trump administration stands opposed to taxpayer-funded birth control, arguing that it diminishes religious freedoms for those Americans opposed to contraception; and 2) in response to #MeToo stories and the prevalence of sexual harassment and violence against women worldwide.

The money, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be spent over four years “to help women exercise their economic power,” Melinda Gates wrote. She noted that research shows economic power is the “most promising entry points for gender equality.” 

“Simply put when money flows into the hands of women who have the authority to use it, everything changes,” Melinda Gates wrote.

Will The Berlin Girls Club Confront Ivanka Trump About Her Father's Anti-Contraception Drive In Poor Countries?

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Will The Berlin Girls Club Confront Ivanka Trump About Her Father's Anti-Contraception Drive In Poor Countries?

The coverage of Ivanka Trump in the German press in the days leading up to her speech was similar to that at home, where she has been criticized on late night programs like “Saturday Night Live” for being “complicit” in her father’s agenda. The front page of one daily newspaper, Berliner Zeitung, featured a photograph of Ivanka Trump under the headline “First Flusterin,” or “the first whisperer.” 

Ivanka can read the headlines, and anticipating not being taken seriously, having no policy chops, the Trump daughter co-authored an op-ed in The Financial Times, with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, arguing that the estimated 170-year timeline to close the gender pay gap "is unacceptable."

{.. . }

It's ironic to read Ivanka Trump's commentary about empowering women in developing countries, after her father has decimated family-planning budgets in place under the Obama Administration and instituted when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. 

Daily News: Samira Wiley In 'The Handmaid's Tale'; Prince Harry Honors Diana on Landmine Free World Day April 4

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Melinda Gates Assumes Primary Role In Defending Women's Health & Reproductive Rights Worldwide

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Melinda Gates Assumes Primary Role In Defending Women's Health & Reproductive Rights Worldwide AOC Front Page

Pictured above on her first trip to Africa in 1993, Melinda Gates could now be the most important action hero for women worldwide. That includes America, where the Republican War on Women is in full swing with their commitment to defunding Planned Parenthood, rolling back not only abortion rights but rights to contraception as well, and focusing on personhood legislation, which not only establishes a legal definition of life as beginning at conception, but severely limiting the civil rights of all pregnant women by equating her rights with those of a 24-hour old fertilized egg.

With the rise of alt-right lover Donald Trump as America's next president, the Trump administration is surrounding themselves with officials who want to implement this full-court strategy against American women asap.

Without Hillary Clinton at the helm of the American presidency, the future of women's most precious rights probably falls to Melinda Gates, who is notably apolitical. The first order in a Trump administration will be once again cutting off any federal government support for contraception and family planning worldwide. America's Catholic bishops and Christian conservatives in Congress won't permit it.

Read on about Melinda Gates and her refusal to bow to these massive powers that dominate American culture. 

Christy Turlington's Maternal Health 'No Woman No Cry' Full Documentary

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Christy Turlington's Maternal Health 'No Woman No Cry' Full Documentary

Statistically, development experts agree that women are far more likely than men to invest available resources on their children’s education and welfare. When mothers are killed or left debilitated by childbirth, cycles of poverty and misery are particularly harsh for girl babies and young girls in the family. 

I didn’t want it to feel like an advocacy film,” says Christy Turlington about her documentary “No Woman No Cry”, which also made its debut at last week’s conference on reproductive health. “I didn’t want it to feel like an advocacy film,” Turlington says, “I wanted it to be an advocacy tool.” That means “No Woman No Cry” is almost wholly free of development speak and policy recommendations. via The Daily Beast

All who know her understand that Christy Turlington Burns is an activist first and a supermodel second. Turlington may have just signed up for the A/W Louis Vuitton campaign, but her focus is sharing the powerful stories of at-risk pregnant women in four parts of the world, including a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a slum of Bangladesh, a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, and a prenatal clinic in the United States.