History > 2006 > USA > Women (II)

Megan Jerke

demonstrated against abortion with members of the group Bound 4 Life

in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Carmel Zucker for The New York Times

 Battle Over Abortion Focuses on South Dakota Vote        NYT

1.11.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/us/01abort.html

Gender Pay Gap,

Once Narrowing,

Is Stuck in Place

December 24, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, women of all economic levels — poor, middle class and rich — were steadily gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force. By the mid-’90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier.

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-’90s.

For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span.

These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements — the first female secretary of state, the first female lead anchor of a nightly newscast, the first female president of Princeton, and, next month, the first female speaker of the House — do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say.

A decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision.

“Nothing happened to the pay gap from the mid-1950s to the late ’70s,” said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell and a leading researcher of gender and pay. “Then the ’80s stood out as a period of sharp increases in women’s pay. And it’s much less impressive after that.”

Last year, college-educated women between 36 and 45 years old, for example, earned 74.7 cents in hourly pay for every dollar that men in the same group did, according to Labor Department data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. A decade earlier, the women earned 75.7 cents.

The reasons for the stagnation are complicated and appear to include both discrimination and women’s own choices. The number of women staying home with young children has risen recently, according to the Labor Department; the increase has been sharpest among highly educated mothers, who might otherwise be earning high salaries. The pace at which women are flowing into highly paid fields also appears to have slowed.

Like so much about gender and the workplace, there are at least two ways to view these trends. One is that women, faced with most of the burden for taking care of families, are forced to choose jobs that pay less — or, in the case of stay-at-home mothers, nothing at all.

If the government offered day-care programs similar to those in other countries or men spent more time caring for family members, women would have greater opportunity to pursue whatever job they wanted, according to this view.

The other view is that women consider money a top priority less often than men do. Many may relish the chance to care for children or parents and prefer jobs, like those in the nonprofit sector, that offer more opportunity to influence other people’s lives.

Both views, economists note, could have some truth to them.

“Is equality of income what we really want?” asked Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who has written about the revolution in women’s work over the last generation. “Do we want everyone to have an equal chance to work 80 hours in their prime reproductive years? Yes, but we don’t expect them to take that chance equally often.”

Whatever role their own preferences may play in the pay gap, many women say they continue to battle subtle forms of lingering prejudice. Indeed, the pay gap between men and women who have similar qualifications and work in the same occupation — which economists say is one of the purest measures of gender equality — has barely budged since 1990.

Today, the discrimination often comes from bosses who believe they treat everyone equally, women say, but it can still create a glass ceiling that keeps them from reaching the best jobs at a company.

“I don’t think anyone would ever say I couldn’t do the job as well as a man,” said Christine Kwapnoski, a 42-year-old bakery manager at a Sam’s Club in Northern California who will make $63,000 this year, including overtime. Still, Ms. Kwapnoski said she was paid significantly less than men in similar jobs, and she has joined a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores, which owns Sam’s Club.

The lawsuit is part of a spurt of cases in recent years contending gender discrimination at large companies, including Boeing, Costco, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Last month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case against Goodyear Tire and Rubber.

At Sam’s Club, Ms. Kwapnoski said that when she was a dock supervisor, she discovered that a man she supervised was making as much as she was. She was later promoted with no raise, even though men who received such a promotion did get more money, she said.

“Basically, I was told it was none of my business, that there was nothing I could do about it,” she said.

Ms. Kwapnoski does not have a bachelor’s degree, but her allegations are typical of the recent trends in another way: the pay gap is now largest among workers earning relatively good salaries.

At Wal-Mart, the percentage of women dwindles at each successive management level. They hold almost 75 percent of department-head positions, according to the company. But only about 20 percent of store managers, who can make significantly more than $100,000, are women.

This is true even though women receive better evaluations than men on average and have longer job tenure, said Brad Seligman, the lead plaintiffs’ lawyer in the lawsuit.

Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Wal-Mart, said the company did not discriminate. “It’s really a leap of logic to assume that the data is a product of discrimination,” Mr. Boutrous said. “People have different interests, different priorities, different career paths” — and different levels of desire to go into management, he added.

The other companies that have been sued also say they do not discriminate.

Economists say that the recent pay trends have been overlooked because the overall pay gap, as measured by the government, continues to narrow. The average hourly pay of all female workers rose to 80.1 percent of men’s pay last year, from 77.3 percent in 2000.

But that is largely because women continue to close the qualifications gap. More women than men now graduate from college, and the number of women with decades of work experience is still growing rapidly. Within many demographic groups, though, women are no longer gaining ground.

Ms. Blau and her husband, Lawrence M. Kahn, another Cornell economist, have done some of the most detailed studies of gender and pay, comparing men and women who have the same occupation, education, experience, race and labor-union status. At the end of the late 1970s, women earned about 82 percent as much each hour as men with a similar profile. A decade later, the number had shot up to 91 percent, offering reason to wonder if women would reach parity.

But by the late ’90s, the number remained at 91 percent. Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn have not yet examined the current decade in detail, but she said other data suggested that there had been little movement.

During the 1990s boom, college-educated men received larger raises than women on average. Women have done slightly better than the men in the last few years, but not enough to make up for the late ’90s, the Economic Policy Institute analysis found.

There is no proof that discrimination is the cause of the remaining pay gap, Ms. Blau said. It is possible that the average man, brought up to view himself the main breadwinner, is more committed to his job than the average woman.

But researchers note that government efforts to reduce sex discrimination have ebbed over the period that the pay gap has stagnated. In the 1960s and ’70s, laws like Title VII and Title IX prohibited discrimination at work and in school and may have helped close the pay gap in subsequent years. There have been no similar pushes in the last couple of decades.

Women have continued to pour into high-paid professions like law, medicine and corporate management where they were once rare, but the increases seem to have slowed, noted Reeve Vanneman, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.

Medicine offers a particularly good window on these changes. Roughly 40 percent of medical school graduates are women today. Yet many of the highest paid specialties, the ones in which salaries often exceed $400,000, remain dominated by men and will be for decades to come, based on the pipeline of residents.

Only 28 percent of radiology residents in 2004-5 were women, the Association of American Medical Colleges has reported. Only 10 percent of orthopedic surgery residents were female. The specialties in which more than half of new doctors are women, like dermatology, family medicine and pediatrics, tend to pay less.

Melanie Kingsley, a 28-year-old resident at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said she had wanted to be a doctor for as long as she could recall. For a party celebrating her graduation from medical school, her mother printed up invitations with a photo of Dr. Kingsley wearing a stethoscope — when she was a toddler.

As the first doctor in her family, though, she did not have a clear idea of which specialty she would choose until she spent a summer working alongside a female dermatologist in Chicago. There, she saw that dermatologists worked with everyone from newborns to the elderly and worked on nearly every part of the body, and she was hooked.

“You get paid enough to support your family and enjoy life,” said Dr. Kingsley, a lifelong Indiana resident. “Yeah, maybe I won’t make a lot of money. But I’ll be happy with my day-to-day job, and that’s the reason I went into medicine — to help other people.” She added: “I have seen people do it for the money, and they’re not very happy.”

The gender differences among medical specialties point to another aspect of the current pay gap. In earlier decades, the size of the gap was similar among middle-class and affluent workers. At times, it was actually smaller at the top.

But the gap is now widest among highly paid workers. A woman making more than 95 percent of all other women earned the equivalent of $36 an hour last year, or about $90,000 a year for working 50 hours a week. A man making more than 95 percent of all other men, putting in the same hours, would have earned $115,000 — a difference of 28 percent.

At the very top of the income ladder, the gap is probably even larger. The official statistics do not capture the nation’s highest earners, and in many fields where pay has soared — Wall Street, hedge funds, technology — the top jobs are overwhelmingly held by men.

    Gender Pay Gap, Once Narrowing, Is Stuck in Place, NYT, 24.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/business/24gap.html

South Dakotans Reject Abortion Measure

November 8, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:30 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) -- South Dakota voters on Tuesday rejected the toughest abortion law in the land -- a measure that would have outlawed the procedure under almost any circumstances.

The Legislature passed the law last winter in an attempt to prompt a challenge aimed at getting the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Instead of filing a lawsuit, opponents gathered petition signatures to put the measure on the general election ballot for a statewide vote.

The measure drew money, volunteers and attention from national groups; combined spending by the two campaigns exceeded $4 million in a state with only about 750,000 people. Finance reports filed in the campaign's final week revealed that an unidentified donor had given at least $750,000 to help the ban's supporters.

The campaign turned quickly from the overall issue of abortion rights when opponents attacked the law as extreme, arguing that it goes too far because it would not allow abortions in cases of rape, incest or a threat to the life of a pregnant woman.

Supporters countered that the law would allow doctors to protect the lives of pregnant women with medical problems. They also argued that rape and incest victims would be protected by a provision that says nothing in the abortion ban would prevent women from getting emergency contraceptives up to the point a pregnancy could be determined.

The measure gave new hope to those who believe passionately that abortion must be stopped, said Leslee Unruh, leader of the campaign organization supporting the ban.

''They are energetic. They've waited a long time for a day like this to come, where they all come together and work to do something,'' Unruh said late in the campaign.

Jan Nicolay, a former state lawmaker who led the group opposing the measure, said she was surprised at the fervor the ban roused in those who believe in abortion rights.

''I think we probably lit a match and we got a spark going that I don't think people anticipated would happen,'' Nicolay said when her group succeeded in getting the law referred to a statewide vote.

The debate split not only the general public, but also the medical community. Ads run by both sides featured doctors giving their interpretations of the law.

Regardless of the election outcome, the battle is expected to continue. If voters approve the ban, the measure likely will be challenged in court. If the ban is rejected, lawmakers opposed to abortion could pass a less restrictive measure next year.

    South Dakotans Reject Abortion Measure, NYT, 8.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-ELN-South-Dakota-Abortion.html

In Virginia Race,

Women May Be the Deciders

November 3, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBIN TONER

FAIRFAX, Va., Nov. 1 — There is, unquestionably, a striking amount of testosterone in the Virginia Senate race between Senator George Allen, football-tossing Republican conservative, and Jim Webb, Democrat, Vietnam veteran and chronicler of the warrior tradition.

But the real struggle in this exceedingly tight contest, one of a handful that will determine control of the Senate, may be decided by how women vote.

In the final stretch before Election Day, both candidates have high-profile Virginia women campaigning on their behalf. Mary Matalin, the Republican strategist, is urging women to “talk to your girlfriends” on Mr. Allen’s behalf. Lynda Robb, the wife of former Senator Chuck Robb and a daughter of President Lyndon B. Johnson, is hailing Mr. Webb as “understanding the needs of Virginia’s families.”

The Allen and Webb campaigns have attacked each other throughout the fall over their commitment (or lack thereof) to women’s issues and concerns, and they are ending, to a large extent, with women’s voices. In one Webb commercial being broadcast this week, a woman named April Cain looks into the camera and declares, “I have two boys, one is 9 and one is 12.”

“George Allen hasn’t done anything to help my family,” Ms. Cain adds.

In a new commercial for Mr. Allen, put up by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the female announcer intones that Mr. Webb’s writings “routinely stereotype women as promiscuous objects.”

“Arrogantly and outrageously,” the voice continues, “Webb refuses to be ashamed of what he’s written.”

The battle for the female vote began in earnest earlier this fall, when the Allen campaign, struggling to regain control of the race after several missteps, took aim at Mr. Webb’s argument 30 years ago against women in combat and the admission of women to the Naval Academy.

For much of the fall, commercials have featured retired military women arguing for — and against — Mr. Webb, who has said that he has changed over the years and that he should be judged by his record of advancing women when he was secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration.

Last week, when polls showed the race a dead heat, the Allen campaign introduced a new issue seemingly tailored for women: saying Mr. Webb’s novels included sexually explicit scenes and “chauvinistic attitudes.”

Mr. Webb’s allies noted that his novels, mostly about men at war, were, first of all, fiction, and, second, had been widely acclaimed by a spectrum of prominent people like Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a fellow Vietnam veteran.

Those attacks, some analysts say, help explain why some recent polls show Mr. Webb and Mr. Allen running close among women.

“We don’t have a gender gap,” said Harry L. Wilson, director of a new Roanoke College Poll, alluding to the Democrats’ traditional advantage among women, although other polls have indicated the Democratic edge remains.

Equally striking is that Mr. Webb is neck and neck with Mr. Allen among men, which is unusual for a Democrat.

Mr. Webb’s strategists acknowledge that he has room to increase his support among women, but say he will realize that potential in the final days.

“Sure, they did break through with this stuff that happened 30 years ago,” said Kristian Denny Todd, Mr. Webb’s press secretary. “But at the end of the day, a lot of these women have small children, they care about education, they care about the war.

“They’ll say, this stuff happened 30 years ago. But he’s with me on things I care about today.”

That case is made, in part, by the commercial featuring Ms. Cain, who argues that while Mr. Allen has been in the Senate, health care costs have continued to rise, “college tuition is out of control” and Mr. Allen gave himself a raise. Another Webb ad asserted that Mr. Allen “voted against family and medical leave three times.”

Steve Jarding, an adviser to the Webb campaign, said, “The dilemma for Allen is he’s not a moderate on women’s issues.”

The Allen campaign has relied heavily on Susan Allen, the candidate’s wife, to make its case to women. In an interview, Ms. Allen denounced the negative tone of the Senate campaign, but defended the Allen campaign’s highlighting of Mr. Webb’s novels.

“The fact is, my husband’s life has been an open book in this campaign — all his speeches, votes, his record has been an open book for everyone to examine,” she said.

The demographics in this race revolve around more than sex. The populous suburbs of Northern Virginia are becoming an increasing source of strength for Democrats; the strategic imperative for Mr. Webb is to exploit that advantage fully to offset any losses in less friendly areas.

The Senate campaign over the past four months has taken striking turns. Mr. Allen, long considered a potential 2008 contender for the White House, saw his lead melt away after making what was perceived as a demeaning racial reference to a Webb volunteer of Indian descent. This week, a scuffle broke out at an Allen campaign event after a liberal blogger aggressively tried to question Mr. Allen about his treatment of his first wife, Anne Waddell. Ms. Waddell issued a statement on the Allen campaign Web site this week saying that Mr. Allen “was, and is, a wonderful person,” and that if she lived in Virginia she would vote for him.

The anger between the two campaigns over tactics and strategy is palpable.

Adding to it are stark differences between the two candidates on issues, beginning with the war in Iraq. Mr. Webb, a first-time candidate for elective office, said he entered the race largely because of the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq, which he had sharply criticized even before the invasion; Mr. Allen has supported the president’s policies.

Mr. Webb is closing out his campaign with a new, upbeat spot in which he declares, to the camera: “Those in power haven’t served us. They’ve failed to protect our working people, they failed us on ethics and they’re failing in Iraq. Bottom line: they’re not fighting for you. I will.”

Mr. Allen, in one of his closing commercials, declares, “I want to continue fighting for our shared values: lower taxes, a better education for our children, and a safer, stronger America.”

At a campaign event in Fairfax on Wednesday, Mr. Allen, seeking his second term after serving as governor of Virginia, said his campaign was “going really well.”

But the Webb campaign was claiming momentum, and independent analysts said the race remained too close to call.

    In Virginia Race, Women May Be the Deciders, NYT, 3.11.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/us/politics/03virginia.html

Working Mothers

Find Some Peace on the Road

November 1, 2006
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

Before Lucia Skwarek, a portfolio manager and mother in New York City, gets on a plane bound for business in Moscow or Milan, there are not only meetings, but play dates to schedule. When she is done wooing investors for her hedge fund and parsing a pile of e-mail messages, though, Ms. Skwarek looks forward to a little “me” time.

“I can go home and deal with two screaming 6-year-old twins and a grumpy preteen,” she said. “Or I can go to the Four Seasons in Mexico City and drink Cognac in the bathtub.”

Hers is the guilty pleasure of the traveling working mom. After slogging through airports, sitting through PowerPoints and networking through lunches, there is, at the end of the day, a small taste of freedom. And as hard as it can be to balance the demands of business trips and family life, for the relatively small group of employed mothers who travel, it can be delicious.

No chores to tackle. No homework to oversee. No bedtimes to bird-dog. For many working mothers, business trips become mini-vacations. The simple pleasure of unbroken sleep and an uninterrupted meal can feel like an indulgent getaway for these women burdened at both ends. But throw in a massage or a leisurely dinner with an old friend, which they often do, and for the parent of a toddler, preschooler or ’tween, it becomes a true holiday.

Experts say that mothers travel on business less often than fathers, but more mothers are in the workforce than ever before, and a recent study by the Travel Industry Association in Washington found that 43 percent of business travelers in 2004 were women, up from 39 percent in 2000.

At the Park Hyatt Los Angeles during the 5-to-8-p.m. Manicures & Martinis, Pinots & Pedicures happy hour in the Kara Spa, chitchat often turns to children.

“It’s a way for them to have a break and take care of themselves, whereas they may not get to do that at home,” said the spa director, Jenny Helling. To be sure, not all businesswomen relish a break from family life, and even those who savor a night or more away say they miss their children mightily and hightail it home. Interviews with female business travelers suggest, too, that work trips require a great deal of preparation on their part to ensure the smooth running of the household, from leaving checks for piano teachers to mapping out detailed schedules for husbands and baby sitters to follow. For the newest mothers, the relief from predawn feedings is offset by the hassle of pumping breast milk.

But the allure of business trips for women is all the greater precisely because women tend to be the primary managers of the nitty-gritty of home life, segueing from the corporate world to the domestic realm.

“You do feel so cool when you have a few minutes to be a human being, not in full corporate mode and not in mommy mode,” said Maureen Borzacchiello, the owner of a company in Lynbrook, N.Y., that produces trade show displays. “When I can have a few moments to steal away, I do enjoy it. I’m not going to lie.”

Ms. Borzacchiello, the mother of 4-year-old Dominick, recalled two trips this summer: In Chicago, she sipped an $85 bottle of Italian red over a three-hour dinner with a colleague, who also happens to be a close friend. In Miami, where she stayed at the hipper-than-thou Delano Hotel, she had to wait for a rush package to be delivered. “I hung out in my room for a couple of hours, and I remember sitting in a chair with my feet up on a big white ottoman,” she said. “I sat there reading, and I took a minute and thought when was the last time during daylight hours that I read a book without ‘Mommy, mommy, mommy’?”

Yet, like other working mothers, Ms. Borzacchiello, who travels every six to eight weeks for two to four days at a time, also finds the trips emotionally fraught. She leaves “Mommy loves you” notes in Dominick’s playroom. She schedules her flights to coincide with her son’s sleep. And, she said, she “gets choked up” with every good-bye.

Erin M. Fuller, executive director of the National Association of Women Business Owners, a nonprofit organization based in McLean, Va., with 8,000 members, said that women “feel conflicted about business travel.” The younger the child, the harder it is, she said.

The mother of an 18-month-old boy, Ms. Fuller is in constant motion herself, crisscrossing the country for meetings and fund-raising. But since her son’s birth, she said, she has tried to delegate travel to colleagues or conduct business by phone. When she must hit the road, she tries to return the same day or to at least get back before her son awakes the next morning. “It’s very rare to find a woman who has a family who builds in that extra day to see where you are,” she said. “We had a meeting in Santa Fe in July, and I had never been to New Mexico. Before I had kids, I would have certainly stayed over and gone to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Instead I went screeching out of the hotel parking lot to try to get a flight that would get me home to Washington by midnight.”

More unusual is her rule that if she has to be away for more than two nights, which is the case about 25 percent of the time, she takes her son along. Her husband, a venture capital finance consultant, has a flexible work schedule and is thus able to go along as well to chaperone their son. “He’s a well-traveled little kid,” she said. “He’s been in 22 states.”

But even Ms. Fuller finds solo business trips a welcome respite, especially the actual travel part, which to her feels more like “found time” than the rest of the trip. “I bring a big stack of magazines like Vanity Fair and In Style that are totally not for business and get that done on the plane without anyone asking me to read a picture book,” she said. “It’s nice to have control over what you’re choosing to view.”

Other mothers say the logistics involved in preparing for a business trip can leave them in need of a real vacation.

Stacy I. Hirsh, who works in the marketing and business development division of a financial services company in Manhattan, said she writes a series of notes for the baby sitter to put in her two children’s lunch boxes, one for each child for every day she’s away.

There are the checks to make out for the piano teachers, cash to leave for the housekeeper and instructions highlighting the week’s requirements.

“It’s, ‘Don’t forget to do spelling words with Brandon and don’t forget that Samantha needs to wear a patterned shirt because she’s learning patterns,’ ” said Ms. Hirsh, who travels in spurts, making 5 to 10 trips a year. “If you organize it in advance, it can be a good experience all around.”

Then there is a different sort of guilt that arises not from whiny children so much as the half-concealed judgments of colleagues and clients.

“You meet all these investors, and they’re all men,” said Ms. Skwarek, who has 6-year-old twins and an 11-year-old. “They all look at me, and they always ask, ‘Oh, and how often do you travel?’ It’s such a loaded question. I’m now going to look like a bad mom or a bad portfolio manager.”

While working mothers may not squeeze in an extra day of sightseeing, they can, and do, zealously safeguard their evenings.

Like the Larchmont mother of a 12-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son who is a managing director for a bond insurance company in Manhattan. The woman asked that her name not be revealed because she did not have her boss’s permission to talk to the press, but confided that she makes monthly business trips feel more like getaways by pretending to be out of touch — no calls to friends or her mother. The woman said she clears her head of the chores and paperwork awaiting her at home. And, when possible, she has a date with herself at night.

“I was in Las Vegas for a few days and I ditched the clients and saw a show,” she remembered. “I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to give myself a break.’ ”

For other women, the real thrill comes at bedtime. As Cheryl Squadrito, a publicist who lives in Haddonfield, N.J., recently prepared for her first business trip since having children, overnight in a high-end hotel in Atlantic City, she dreamed of a massage, maybe even a manicure.

But what really got her going was the sleep factor.

“I’ll be calling home a million times, but the thought of sleeping in a bed without my 2-year-old saying she wants some juice in the middle of the night or my 4-year-old saying, ‘Mommy, I need to tinkle,’ is so incredible,” she said. “Just the thought of being alone in a big bed with clean sheets....”

    Working Mothers Find Some Peace on the Road, NYT, 1.11.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/business/01travel.html

 

Wooden crosses intended to represent aborted fetuses

stand on the lawn of O'Gorman High School in Sioux Falls, S.D.

Carmel Zucker for The New York Times

 Battle Over Abortion Focuses on South Dakota Vote        NYT

1.11.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/us/01abort.html

Battle Over Abortion

Focuses on South Dakota Vote

November 1, 2006
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — In the downtown headquarters of those opposing a ban on nearly all abortions in this state, there are notes from around the country taped up and down the hallway: “They need to butt out of women’s lives” and “Why did S.D. vote for this?”

On the other side of town, in a warehouse decorated in pink, the supporters of the ban doggedly work a phone bank, in some cases young children playing nearby.

The battle here over a statewide ballot measure to install one of the country’s strictest anti-abortion laws is playing out in television commercials, yard signs and Sunday sermons. It is also drawing the attention of national advocates on both sides of the abortion debate, who are watching the campaign with deep intensity and even fear.

Both sides predict that the outcome of the vote in South Dakota could send the country’s broader debate over abortion rights swerving in new directions, and will set the tone for the fate of similarly strict laws being considered in nearly a dozen other states.

“I think there’s some sense out there that — ‘By golly, if they can do it there, we’re going to do it here,’ ” said Nancy Keenan, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, which opposes the South Dakota ban.

Daniel McConchie, the vice president of Americans United for Life, which favors passage of the measure, said a defeat at the polls on Nov. 7 could take the steam out of efforts to impose even less restrictive measures, like parental notification rules or waiting periods, that have been the focus of the anti-abortion movement in recent years.

“There’s fear that legislators elsewhere would see what happened there and try to play it safer,” Mr. McConchie said. “That would have a chilling effect on more incremental legislation in other places.”

The South Dakota ban was passed by the Legislature in February but was pushed to a statewide vote by opponents. If the law survives, it would become a felony for a doctor in South Dakota to perform abortions except to prevent the death of the pregnant woman. The latest poll shows voters leaning against the ban, but its fate remains uncertain and both sides are now clearly searching to grab the last, undecided voters whose views on abortion may fall somewhere in the blurry middle.

For that, the most extreme arguments are nowhere to be found. No bloody fetuses fill billboards, no absolute claims are being offered about women’s rights.

Instead, in calls from a phone bank at the ban opponents’ headquarters, volunteers quietly tell potential voters that the law is just too narrow, failing to allow abortions in circumstances like rape or incest. The supporters of the ban, meanwhile, speak in gentle tones about how abortion hurts women.

“I refuse to show pictures of dead babies,” said Leslee Unruh, who leads Vote Yes For Life, the group that is campaigning for the law, reflecting on methods used by anti-abortion groups. “That’s what the old way was, and that’s why they were losing all these years.”

The messages may be muted to appeal to moderates, but the debate has nonetheless grown tense.

Local advocates on each side insist that they are drawing mainly on South Dakotans for help, while also insisting that the other side is getting significant help from wealthy, powerful, well-organized operations outside of the state.

The Rev. Jerry Falwell issued an Internet plea to his followers, calling on them in September to “counter the propaganda” Planned Parenthood would be promoting. And Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, scoffed at Mr. Falwell’s claims about how much money her group would spend, but acknowledged, “This is really on the top of everyone’s mind.”

Until the week beginning Oct. 29, the political groups have not been required by state rules to publicly disclose the amount or sources of their money since early summer. They were required to submit financial disclosures to the secretary of state’s office with postmarks of Oct. 31.

[Neither report had arrived there Tuesday.

[The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families, which has led efforts to oppose the ban, said late Tuesday that the group raised more than $1.8 million (not including in-kind contributions) since late June, all but $160,000 of that from donors outside the state. Vote Yes For Life, which supports the ban, said it was still deciding whether to release some of its figures late Tuesday evening.]

Oregon and California have abortion measures on their ballots this year, both weighing parental notification laws, similar to provisions for parental notification or consent that exist in various forms in 34 states.

But because of its breadth and scope, South Dakota’s measure has eclipsed the other two measures when it comes to national campaign efforts, which have included ambitious fund-raising drives and potluck suppers in 233 towns around the country.

South Dakota’s abortion law was intentionally sweeping and was designed, as Gov. Mike Rounds has described it, as a “full frontal attack” on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 United States Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal.

If upheld by the voters, the law is also certain to draw a lawsuit from Planned Parenthood — which operates the only abortion clinic in the state, where about 800 abortions are performed a year — setting off the legal battle that the ban’s authors had anticipated and wished for: the most direct challenge to Roe v. Wade in more than a decade. The ban, which could take effect as soon as the state’s vote is certified, would probably be put on hold while the case makes its way through the courts.

In the continuing quest to sway wavering voters, the debate in recent days has centered on what the law says and does not say about exceptions — a question that seemed not to be in doubt for many months after state lawmakers passed the bill and Governor Rounds signed it in March.

A month earlier, legislators had voted down amendments that would have allowed abortions in cases of incest, rape or in instances when the pregnant woman’s health would be jeopardized (though not fatally).

But supporters of the ban, including advocates on a television commercial that has been broadcast around the state, now say there are other exceptions written in the law.

In the commercial, as more than a dozen doctors — some of the scores of members of a group calling itself South Dakota Physicians for Life — stand together in white coats, stethoscopes draped around their necks, Dr. Mark Rector says: “This measure does provide exception for the life and health of the mother.”

Asked about the commercial’s assertions, the ban’s supporters say the law includes “an exception” for the health of the mother because it would allow a doctor to treat a sick mother for her illness and, if treatment accidentally resulted in the death of a fetus, that would not be deemed a crime.

The ban also does not apply to the use of emergency contraception — the so-called “morning after pill” — in the first days after conception, a fact that ban supporters say amounts to “an exception” that would cover rape and incest cases.

[The new debate may reflect the polls, the latest of which found that 52 percent of those polled said they would vote against the ban, 42 percent for keeping it. Another 6 percent were undecided in the Mason-Dixon Polling & Research survey published in the Argus Leader of Sioux Falls on Sunday and the margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points.

[But the poll also found that 56 percent of those who opposed the ban or were undecided said they would support it if it carried a clear exception for rape and incest.]

In a recent interview, Roger Hunt, a state representative who sponsored the bill, said he and others were clarifying points that had always been part of the law. “Regardless of how we label these things or whether we use the phrase ‘exceptions,’ what we’re saying is that there are these provisions to deal with such cases,” Mr. Hunt said.

Opponents of the ban have filed complaints with local television stations over the commercial, saying supporters are trying to confuse undecided voters in the final days.

    Battle Over Abortion Focuses on South Dakota Vote, NYT, 1.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/us/01abort.html

What Do Women Want? Just Ask

October 29, 2006
The New York Times
By MICKEY MEECE

FOR most of the 27 years it has been in business in Canada, Shane Homes has staked its claim as one of the country’s leading regional homebuilders the old-fashioned way: it devised and executed cookie-cutter designs for new houses just as fast as the orders came in. As the economy of its home base, Calgary, Alberta, soared on the back of oil and gas riches, it could have continued minting money by sticking with that tried-and-true approach. But two years ago, smack in the middle of a housing boom and heightened competition, Shane Homes dumped its old ways and adopted a new blueprint.

The overhaul began at a real estate conference in 2003, when Shane Wenzel, the builder’s namesake and its head of sales and marketing, heard a speech about the tremendous buying power of women. That moment, Mr. Wenzel recalled, was an “epiphany.” He set up small “listening groups” of women to tap into the needs of people who actually lived in his company’s homes. What Mr. Wenzel heard wasn’t pretty. “The ladies never held back once,” he said. “They were brutally honest.”

The kitchens in the company’s homes, the women said, were all wrong. The pantries were tiny, and the sinks needed to overlook a window so kids in the backyard could be monitored. And the mudrooms! They shared space with laundry rooms, meaning that dirty floors might sit right beneath clean laundry. (“It’s called a mud/laundry room?” one incredulous woman asked.) After that, Shane Homes subjected designs to similar grillings — before they were built — and adapted them accordingly.

“Shane Homes had the revolutionary idea of asking women what they wanted in a home,” said Joanne Thomas Yaccato, a Toronto consultant and author who advised the company on female consumers. “The revolutionary part is that they not only listened, they actually built the darn thing.”

Shane Homes is hardly alone. More companies, in the United States and elsewhere, have realized that they overlook women at their own financial peril. The companies are realigning their marketing and design practices, learning to court an increasingly female-centric consumer base that boasts more financial muscle and purchasing independence than ever before.

“We are perhaps on the first step to a matriarchal society; women will earn more money than men if current trends continue by 2028,” said Michael J. Silverstein of the Boston Consulting Group. “The trend has been escalating in the last 10 years as there has been a gradual, slow erosion of the power balance in the family, a psychic rebalancing.”

Women, Mr. Silverstein added, are “controlling purchases and driving a shift in our economy.”

Retailers like Home Depot, Lowe’s, Sears, Best Buy and others recognize that women are running their households like purchasing managers. Some are “identifying stores that have more female shoppers and offering additional services,” including sales support, customized signs and special product displays, said Dana L. Telsey, who runs her own independent research firm. Travel companies, automakers, and other companies, meanwhile, have had to cater to the tastes of women who have careers outside the home and are pursuing hobbies and other pricey interests. The phenomenon is readily apparent on the Internet, where Web sites built around the needs and interests of such groups as female homeowners and car buyers have gained steady traction.

Much of that shift has to do with education and pay. At American colleges and universities, women represent 57 percent of undergraduate classes and 58 percent of graduate classes, according to the American Council on Education. (They also hold a slight majority in the overall population.) And education, in turn, has helped to bolster salaries and income. In 2005, government data show, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median weekly earnings of $585, or 81 percent of the $722 median for their male counterparts, up from about 63 percent in 1979.

“Women are making 70 percent of travel decisions, for the family, for their own getaways or for people at work,” said Niki Leondakis, the chief operating officer of Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants in San Francisco. “It’s surprising that more people are not including women in their marketing.”

But some big retailers say they are, in fact, well aware of where purchasing power resides.

Best Buy, for example, “used to be a boy store, built by boys, for boys, but four to five years ago, there was a dramatic flip,” said Julie Gilbert, a vice president with the company. That change, she said, occurred with the rise of must-have products like digital cameras, MP3 players, cellphones and other mobile devices, and products like flat-screen televisions that have became fashionable accessories for the home.

“Women are outspending men in our industry $55 billion to $41 billion,” Ms. Gilbert said. “Not only that, they are actually influencing 90 percent of the purchases. It is a new day in consumer electronics.”

THE same may be true in financial services. MassMutual, which recently introduced “Pearls of Wisdom,” a video-based financial seminar, and added a women’s page to its Web site, has taken the approach a step further. In August, it started a “Selling to Women” educational series to help its agents understand women’s expectations and needs. “When it comes to financial advisers, women will share the most intimate details of their lives,” said Susan W. Sweetser, second vice president of the women’s markets department at MassMutual. “Women don’t just buy based on information; they buy based on emotions, coupled with the facts.”

Health care was the first industry to recognize and adapt to female buyers because it was clear that women were the gatekeepers for most families’ health needs, according to Marti Barletta, president of the TrendSight Group, a research firm in Winnetka, Ill. Financial services was next, followed by home improvement and consumer electronics, she said, as marketers followed the money trail.

While women have always influenced decisions about big-ticket household purchases, their direct spending has expanded substantially in recent years.

Women accounted for 33 percent of the purchases at big-box retailers in 2005, up from 28 percent in 2003, according to the NPD Group, a consumer research firm. “That’s a huge shift,” said Mark J. Delaney, an NPD analyst, “not to be taken lightly.” To be sure, some companies have been examining the needs and interests of female consumers for years. The advertising agency Leo Burnett USA and its LeoShe division created its Girlfriend Groups research services in the 1990s to help clients understand how customers approach brands.

In its current form, Girlfriend Groups finds a volunteer who invites some friends to her house. Once there, they meet researchers who ask them questions about brands and products. “We needed to go deep,” said Denise Fedewa, executive vice president of Leo Burnett USA in Chicago. “We wanted to really peel back their guard and tell us what was going on.”

Ms. Fedewa said the research produced unusually honest and forthcoming results. In a more formal focus group held in a controlled setting, women might say, for example, that they kept only healthy foods in the cupboard for after-school snacks. But in Girlfriend Groups’ research, conducted at a woman’s house, friends would never let a woman get away with fibbing about what’s in the cupboard, Ms. Fedewa said.

Market researchers are now embracing women as much more than domestic divas. They recognize them as buyers with their own careers and fattened pocketbooks, who are finding plenty to do and plenty to buy outside the home. Over the last several years, a cottage industry of consultants and authors, all offering advice and analysis, has sprung up around the pervasiveness of women in the marketplace. A few years ago, Ms. Barletta said, she counted just three competitors; now she estimates that 15 to 20 consultants work in her field.

ON a recent Friday evening, Danisha Krause and three friends checked into the Hotel Palomar in Washington for a “Glam Girls” promotion held by Kimpton. The women are part of a larger group of mostly single women, aged 32 to 40, many of whom graduated from Virginia Tech and meet once a month for group suppers. They have traveled to places like Las Vegas and New York, but on this night the group of four decided to stay closer to home.

For about $300 each, they booked a suite with two adjoining bedrooms and converted it into a party pad. When they arrived, the hotel gave them gift bags containing OPI nail polish that they swapped among themselves, based on their color preferences. They dined in the hotel’s restaurant and then returned to their suite for a private Texas Hold ’Em lesson from a poker expert, while the hotel sent up a steady flow of cocktails and snacks.

“We really had a good time,” Ms. Krause said. “We played a round of blackjack, and craps, too.”

The Glam Girls package is part of the company’s Women in Touch program, the brainchild of Ms. Leondakis. The program, now two years old, offers special promotions and amenities to female guests. “I’m on the road so much,” Ms. Leondakis said. “I generally found that hotels didn’t cater to the specific needs of women travelers.”

She says that some hotels overlook female guests by not emphasizing their personal security — or by offering an abundance of poorly designed rooms. For example, what 5-foot-4 woman has not had to jump up to see herself in hotel mirrors that do not provide full-length views? And why, in so many bathrooms, can makeup supplies fall so easily into the toilet?

Kimpton says 48 percent of its guests are women — compared with a lodging industry norm of 42 percent — and it addresses their needs with rooms that offer more lighting and closet space, better mirrors, bathroom shelves, hand-held steamers and items like razors and toothpaste. There are also in-room wellness programs featuring yoga, Pilates and meditation. And don’t forget in-room safes. “We like to travel with jewelry and we don’t want to wait in line at the front desk,” Ms. Leondakis said.

Other companies are tapping into this same rich vein. Melody Biringer, founded Crave Party in Seattle in 2000 with the idea of events that weave together shopping, bonding and professional networking. Each party has a theme; the women pay a small fee and gather in one location where there is food, shopping and services like manicures and massages. The company’s motto is “Everything you crave, under one roof.”

Ms. Biringer said she started Crave Party because her life as a married entrepreneur prevented her from seeing her best friend more than twice a year.

“I decided that was not acceptable,” Ms. Biringer said. “Life gets in the way. I craved her, and hence the name. I decided I needed to start a business to get women together.”

Crave is now licensed in 13 cities; Ms. Biringer sponsors six parties a year in Seattle. Early on, she said, the parties were aimed at younger women, but after their first visit, the women would return with their mothers. So the groups now attract women 30 to 50 years old.

On a recent afternoon, Ms. Biringer offered a “Girls at Play” party at the Fisher Pavilion-Seattle Center. For $25 each, about 200 participants dined on Mexican salads, shopped and enjoyed activities like yoga, Pilates and dance boot-camp classes; makeup tips; and an active-wear show. They left with a gift bag of goodies.

Ms. Biringer also arranges travel shopping trips for small groups of women to places like Los Angeles and New York. “Some of us end up in Prada, some of us in Century 21, but we always have a blast and, yes, ring up the purchases,” said Barbara Travers, who also attended a Crave Party in Seattle in August. “I’m usually the one dragging us into four-star restaurants and wine shops; they’re usually dragging me into Henri Bendel and Saks.”

Group events like these are tailored to women’s interests, Ms. Biringer said. “We need to get away from it all and be with our trusted friends,” she said. “Despite what people think, we don’t really pamper ourselves that much. When we do, we’re really happy, and men appreciate that.”

Men might also appreciate that more women are handy around the house. Just ask Heidi Baker and Eden Jarrin, the Janes of BeJane.com, the online community they formed in 2003 with another entrepreneur, Phil Breman, and have aimed at women who are do-it-yourselfers. Ms. Baker, who is called the “chief Jane officer,” and Ms. Jarrin, the chief executive, taught themselves how to do home improvement projects, and they share the knowledge on their Web site.

Both women also bought their own homes before they married their husbands. That makes them representatives of another trend: single women are the fastest-growing segment of home buyers, according to the National Association of Realtors, purchasing 21 percent of homes, compared with just 9 percent for single men.

According to Be Jane more women are undertaking home improvement projects on their own. “We’ve seen a huge shift in everything: jobs, wages, home-buying,” Ms. Baker said. Do-it-yourself home improvement, she said, “is one of the last realms.”

Even so, Ms. Baker says stereotypes persist in the marketplace. In a blog posting in September with the heading, “Sorry Sweetie, You Need to Hire Someone,” Ms. Baker related the following encounter at a home improvement store:

“I walked into the lighting section and asked a guy to where I could find the dimmers. Once he takes me there, he turns and makes some comment about how I need to make sure to check with the electrician who’s going to install it. My response was that I would be putting it in myself. As if I hadn’t even said a thing, he tells me, ‘Oh honey, you really do need to hire someone to do this for you so you don’t burn the house down.’ ”

The two “Janes” shrug off such experiences. “We are building a lifestyle so women can learn how to feel confident in the home,” Ms. Jarrin said.

Data suggests that women are feeling quite confident. According to the NPD Group, women bought 47 percent of all painting supplies sold in the United States in June, up from 42 percent in 2003. And they buy about half of all new bathtubs, up from 35 percent.

WHAT BeJane.com is to home improvement, AskPatty.com hopes to be for women and cars. While there are just two Janes, a whole panel of expert automotive women are behind AskPatty, which gives women a blog and a Web site to post questions about all aspects of automobile transactions and maintenance.

The site, which has no advertising, is rolling out an AskPatty Certified Dealership Program. Dealers that complete it are deemed to be female friendly and are searchable by ZIP code. The company has given its seal of approval to 25 dealerships and says that hundreds more have inquired about joining the list.

Just who is Patty?

“Patty is a mom, daughter, wife, niece, grandmother and auntie,” the site explains in part. “Patty is young, old, married, single, an experienced driver, a new driver, a racecar driver, a hot rod driver, a classic car driver, a minivan driver, a truck driver, a luxury car driver, an S.U.V. driver, a disabled driver, a carpool driver.”

Jody DeVere, president of AskPatty, which was formed last summer, notes that women buy more than 50 percent of the new cars and trucks sold in the United States. In 2005, based on data from National Automobile Dealers Association, that amounted to about $200 billion spent on about eight million new vehicles. Although women also bought about half of new cars and trucks a decade ago, Ms. DeVere said, their approach to those decisions has changed.

“The main difference is that women are beginning to understand their purchasing power,” she said. “They are now beginning to demand better treatment and have gotten their voice.” While there are some other valuable auto-buying sites for women, like Edmunds.com/women, Ms. DeVere said, AskPatty is different in that “it is from women by women, but more than that, AskPatty is heartfelt. It’s not just words and information.”

After spending hours on the Internet researching a new car over several months, Beverly McMullen of Upland, Calif., hit upon the AskPatty site. She has a physical disability and needed specific auto modifications.

She visited the site before and after her family bought a 2006 Saturn Vue. Ms. DeVere responded personally to her questions, passing along useful information. Ms. McMullen said she was hesitant about asking for help, but was glad that she did.

“It seemed like I had a task force supporting me,” she said in an e-mail exchange. “AskPatty really jump-started what had seemed like a dead end for me.”

The Internet is also a resource for women taking charge of their own finances. It was only a few decades ago that women — who now buy a big share of products like tires, power tools, lawn mowers, computers, consumer electronics and, of course, homes — could not get a bank loan without a male co-signer, regardless of whether they had their own income.

These days, some women are literally opening their checkbooks to the world on blogs like MyOpenWallet and BostonGal’sOpenWallet, which is run by a woman who identifies herself online only as Jane Dough, to protect her privacy (www.bostongalsopenwallet.blogspot.com). The blog tracks her personal assets monthly (valued at $412,435.59 in October) and calls itself “the ongoing chronicle of a single 30-something Bostonian who is seeking enlightenment and control of her net worth.”

In a telephone interview, she explained that she started blogging a year ago, after she bought a house and paid off her student loans and credit cards. “I started to feel adrift,” she said. “What do I do next? How do I keep motivated?” The blog was her answer.

In her first post, she said: “Speaking publicly about your personal finances has always been a no-no in my family. The result of this is that I often felt unprepared and uneducated about financial matters. I am now in my mid-30’s, single, with a fairly well established professional career. Because I live alone, I make all the financial decisions in my life — good or bad.

“If your parents and peers can’t or won’t show you the way, hopefully sites like this on the Web will.”

For its part, Best Buy is more than willing to show them the way. Online, Best Buy has added “click to call,” so that a shopper can ask a representative to call her back at a time she requests to help with buying decisions. In the stores, it has made the aisles cleaner and wider and added shopping bags as an alternative to carts.

BACK in Calgary, Shane Homes plans to start a new listening group in November, and to keep it going until next summer. Mr. Wenzel, who is 34, says Ms. Yaccato’s advice and book — “The 80 Percent Minority: Reaching the Real World of Women Consumers,” which stipulates that women control 80 percent of every consumer dollar spent — inspired him to create the listening groups.

Shane Homes, whose revenue doubled in six years, to more than 180 million Canadian dollars in fiscal 2005-06, also went beyond listening. It asked women in the groups to design two homes, both named after Ms. Yaccato. Those and other suggestions were incorporated into the design of a house called the Yaccato 2, which went on to win a design award in Alberta.

Shane Homes sold nine Yaccato 2’s in 2005 and has sold five so far this year. Many of the its features have also been incorporated into the designs of the company’s other model homes.

Mr. Wenzel says that Shane Homes now takes about five times longer to design a home than it did just a few years ago.

“It’s critiqued once, twice, three times,” he said. “It’s a longer process, but we end up with better designs.”

What Do Women Want? Just Ask, nYT, 29.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/business/yourmoney/29women.html

To Snoop or Not: Women Draw Line

September 30, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON

Some have followed the men in their lives to strip clubs or to apartments where they caught them with lovers. Some have given thought to listening in on their men’s telephone conversations.

Denni Martin, a secretary who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, said a boyfriend once turned the tables on her: he became so suspicious, he tapped her phone.

Ms. Martin, 50, found out when she stumbled on a cassette tape that turned out to be full of her telephone conversations. There were no whispered “I love you’s” or discussions of illicit rendezvous; she was not cheating on him, Ms. Martin said. But when he proved unable to explain what had driven him to record her calls without her knowledge, she broke up with him.

Eavesdropping, she said, “is nothing I would want to do, because it happened to me.”

As news circulated about Jeanine F. Pirro’s efforts to check up on her husband, many women interviewed over the last three days said they could understand the anger over her suspicions that he was having an affair. But in random interviews in Manhattan — on subways, in parks at lunchtime, on buses at the end of the day — the women said that Ms. Pirro, the Republican candidate for state attorney general, had crossed a line by planning to have him secretly taped.

“I think it’s disgraceful,” said Bridget Burke, 51, an executive assistant at a hedge fund. She said she was shocked at Ms. Pirro’s disclosures and “even at the fact that she doesn’t think she did anything wrong.”

Julie Meehan, who works in television production and lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, said that listening devices and electronic eavesdropping were too much.

“You have no idea the anger that goes through your body at those moments, but I would never go to those lengths,” Ms. Meehan said.

Ms. Meehan’s comments came yesterday, two days after Ms. Pirro disclosed that she had had her husband, Albert, followed for a while last year. Ms. Pirro also disclosed that she had called Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who was then running his own security business, to see about having a listening device placed on the Pirros’ boat. A federal investigation is trying to determine if Ms. Pirro illegally taped her husband.

Of the more than 20 women interviewed, some said they were not sure what Ms. Pirro meant when she declared at a news conference on Wednesday that she was “standing up for women.”

Some said she sounded like any wife with a philandering husband who was determined to hold her family together.

Debbie Fuhrman, 42, a writer and performer who lives in Midtown Manhattan, took that comment as purely political. “Please don’t stand up for me,” she said. “I can stand up for myself.”

Others interpreted Ms. Pirro’s remark to be a slap at the investigation. If she were a man, some of the women interviewed said, there would be no investigation.

“Men can get away with having disreputable events in their pasts,” said Karen Trindle, 23, a music education student. “Women are expected to have cleaner records than men.”

That said, most of the women interviewed also faulted Ms. Pirro for going too far. They said she was wrong to press Mr. Kerik to secretly record her husband and wrong to say she would plant a listening device herself. Ms. Pirro wanted it installed on the family boat, where she suspected he was meeting a mistress.

But they understood her motivation.

“Sometimes you want proof before you accuse somebody,” said Glenda Pink, a nurse’s assistant at New York University Medical Center.

“The bottom line is, all men cheat — well, at least 80 percent of them,” said Ms. Pink, who has been married for eight years. “When he denies it, you could be like ‘here’s the tape and there’s your voice.’ ”

Stephanie Ybarra, 30, a graduate student studying theater management at Yale who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said that she understood the impulse to check up on a husband or boyfriend. She said she and her younger sister Michelle had done that, peeked at e-mail accounts their boyfriends had left open on their computers.

After her sister found a string of romantic e-mail messages to another woman, they “trashed his dorm room,” Ms. Ybarra said.

But Nadesha Grant, a dispatcher for a car service in Manhattan, disagreed with Ms. Pirro’s decision to stay in her marriage. “Standing by your man is not always good,” she said. “Sometimes you’ve got to stand by yourself.”

Ms. Grant has a tattoo on her left arm that once carried her boyfriend’s name. She had his name removed — actually, tattooed over with two purple hearts — for a reason: his best friend told her that he had another girlfriend who was six months pregnant. She said the purple symbolized her pain. She had been so sure that he was the one, that they would marry, that they would be together forever.

Ms. Grant said she sympathized with Ms. Pirro, but believes that nosing around is a bad idea.

“If you dig, you’re going to get hurt,” she said.

As she told the story on a No. 6 subway train on Thursday, a friend, Shellyann Gunn, shook her head and said, “Once a cheater, always a cheater.”

Shirley Ruiz, a social services agent who lives on the Lower East Side, said she followed her husband to a strip club after someone told her he was hanging out there. She said that before she confronted him, she wanted to be sure what she had heard was true.

It was. When she spotted him in the crowd, she walked over and slapped him. “He just sat there,” she said. “He was too embarrassed.”

That was 15 years ago, she said.

“We stuck it out, and now he’s very supportive,” she said.

Leslie Perez, 51, said she was so suspicious of one man she was with that she followed him. One day she knocked on a door she had watched him go through and found him with another woman.

“I was like one of those undercover cops,” she said.

But Ms. Perez said she would not resort to wiretapping. She broke up with him 12 years ago and has been with her current boyfriend almost ever since. She said she would not follow him around because she trusts him more, and besides, the surveillance work was exhausting, and she did not mean emotionally.

“I got tired,” she said. “You could keel over dead from doing that.”

Kate Hammer and Karen James contributed reporting.

To Snoop or Not: Women Draw Line, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/nyregion/30cheat.html

The New Gender Divide

At Colleges,

Women Are Leaving Men

in the Dust

July 9, 2006
The New York Times
By TAMAR LEWIN

Nearing graduation, Rick Kohn is not putting much energy into his final courses.

"I take the path of least resistance," said Mr. Kohn, who works 25 hours a week to put himself through the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "This summer, I looked for the four easiest courses I could take that would let me graduate in August."

It is not that Mr. Kohn, 24, is indifferent to education. He is excited about economics and hopes to get his master's in the field. But the other classes, he said, just do not seem worth the effort.

"What's the difference between an A and a B?" he asks. "Either way, you go on to the next class."

He does not see his female classmates sharing that attitude. Women work harder in school, Mr. Kohn believes. "The girls care more about their G.P.A. and the way they look on paper," he said.

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment.

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.

Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees.

It is not that men are in a downward spiral: they are going to college in greater numbers and are more likely to graduate than two decades ago.

Still, men now make up only 42 percent of the nation's college students. And with sex discrimination fading and their job opportunities widening, women are coming on much stronger, often leapfrogging the men to the academic finish.

"The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a tear, doing much, much better," said Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington.

Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her three years at American University in Washington.

She has a dean's scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her time at American, made the dean's list almost every term and also led the campus women's initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor's degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master's.

She says her intense motivation is not so unusual. "The women here are on fire," she said.

The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men 24 and under attend college as much as, or slightly more than, their sisters, according to the American Council on Education, whose report on these issues is scheduled for release this week.

Young men from low-income families, which are disproportionately black and Hispanic, are the most underrepresented on campus, though in middle-income families too, more daughters than sons attend college. In recent years the gender gap has been widening, especially among low-income whites and Hispanics.

When it comes to earning bachelor's degrees, the gender gap is smaller than the gap between whites and blacks or Hispanics, federal data shows.

All of this has helped set off intense debate over whether these trends show a worrisome achievement gap between men and women or whether the concern should instead be directed toward the educational difficulties of poor boys, black, white or Hispanic.

"Over all, the differences between blacks and whites, rich and poor, dwarf the differences between men and women within any particular group," says Jacqueline King, a researcher for the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis and the author of the forthcoming report.

Differences Seen Early

Still, across all race and class lines, there are significant performance differences between young men and women that start before college.

High school boys score higher than girls on the SAT, particularly on the math section. Experts say that is both because the timed multiple-choice questions play to boys' strengths and because more middling female students take the test. Boys also score slightly better on the math and science sections of national assessment tests. On the same assessments, 12th-grade boys, even those with college-educated parents, do far worse than girls on reading and writing.

Faced with applications and enrollment numbers that tilt toward women, some selective private colleges are giving men a slight boost in admissions. On other campuses the female predominance is becoming noticeable in the female authors added to the reading lists and the diminished dating scene.

And when it gets to graduation, differences are evident too.

At Harvard, 55 percent of the women graduated with honors this spring, compared with barely half the men. And at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, a public university, women made up 64 percent of this year's graduates, and they got 75 percent of the honors degrees and 79 percent of the highest honors, summa cum laude.

Of course, nationwide, there are young men at the top of the class and fields like computer science, engineering and physics that are male dominated.

Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum — students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.

"My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students," said Wendy Moffat, a longtime English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. "But the range among the guys is wider."

From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem diagnosed. As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide or be incarcerated. Such difficulties can have echoes even in college men.

"They have a sense of lassitude, a lack of focus," said William Pollack, director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School.

At a time when jobs that require little education are disappearing, Mr. Mortenson predicts trouble for boys whose "educational attainment is not keeping up with the demands of the economy."

In the 1990's, even as women poured into college at a higher rate than men, attention focused largely on their troubles, especially after the 1992 report "How Schools Shortchange Girls" from the American Association of University Women.

But some scholars say the new emphasis on young men's problems — recent magazine covers and talk shows describing a "boy crisis" — is misguided in a world where men still dominate the math-science axis, earn more money and wield more power than women.

"People keep asking me why this is such a hot topic, and I think it does go back to the ideas people carry in their heads," said Sara Mead, the author of a report for Education Sector, a Washington policy center, that concluded that boys, especially young ones, were making progress on many measures. It suggested that the heightened concern might in part reflect some people's nervousness about women's achievement.

"The idea that girls could be ahead is so shocking that they think it must be a crisis for boys," Ms. Mead said. "I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or something else the boys may be doing?"

Women in the Majority

What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.

Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women.

"The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.

While Harvard accepts men and women in proportions roughly equal to their presence in the applicant pool, other elite universities do not. At Brown University, men made up not quite 40 percent of this year's applicants, but 47 percent of those admitted.

Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore City Community College. And they make up particularly large majorities among older students.

The lower the family income, the greater the disparity between men and women attending college, said Ms. King of the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis.

Thomas diPrete, a Columbia University sociology professor, has found that while boys whose parents had only a high school education used to be more likely to get a college education than their sisters, that has flipped.

Still, the gender gap has moved to the front burner in part because of interest from educated mothers worrying that their sons are adrift or disturbed that their girls are being passed over by admissions officers eager for boys, said Judith Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska professor who has created the Boys Project (boysproject.net), a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys' troubles.

"I hate to be cynical, but when it was a problem of black or poor kids, nobody cared, but now that it's a problem of white sons of college-educated parents, it's moving very rapidly to the forefront," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "At most colleges, there is a sense that a lot of boys are missing in action."

Beyond the data points — graduation rates, enrollment rates, grades — there are subtle differences in the nature of men's and women's college experiences.

In dozens of interviews on three campuses — Dickinson College; American University; and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro — male and female students alike agreed that the slackers in their midst were mostly male, and that the fireballs were mostly female.

Almost all speculated that it had something to do with the women's movement.

"The roles have changed a lot," said Travis Rothway, a 23-year-old junior at American University, a private school where only 36 percent of last year's freshmen were male. "Men have always been the dominant figure, providing for the household, but now women have broken out of their domestic roles in society. I don't think guys' willingness to work and succeed has changed, it's more that the women have stepped up."

Ben Turner, who graduated from American this spring, said he did not believe that work habits were determined by gender — but acknowledged that he and his girlfriend fit the stereotypes.

"She does all her readings for classes, and I don't always," Mr. Turner said. "She's more organized than me, so if there's a paper due a week from Monday, she's already started, and I know I'll be doing it the weekend before. She studies more than I do because she doesn't like cramming and being stressed. She just has a better work ethic than I do."

Ms. Smyers, also at American, said she recently ended a relationship with another student, in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day.

"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month.' That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."

Many male students say with something resembling pride that they get by without much studying.

"If I take a class and never study, I can still get a B," said Scott Daniels, a 22-year-old at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "I know that if I'd applied myself more, I would have had better grades."

On each campus, many young men concluded that the easy B was good enough. But on each campus, some had seen that attitude backfire.

Michael Comes arrived at Dickinson two years ago from a private school in New Jersey where he had done well, but floundered his freshman year.

"I came here with the attitudes I'd had in high school, that the big thing, for guys, is to give the appearance of not doing much work, trying to excel at sports and shine socially," Mr. Comes said. "It's like some cultural A.D.D. for boys, I think — like Bart Simpson. For men, it's just not cool to study."

So when he no longer had parents and teachers keeping after him, or a 10:30 p.m. lights-out rule, he did not do much work.

"I stayed in my room a lot, I slept a lot, and I messed up so much that I had to go to summer school," Mr. Comes said. "But I'm back on track now."

'A Male Entitlement Thing'

On each campus, the young women interviewed talked mostly about their drive to do well.

"Most college women want a high-powered career that they are passionate about," Ms. Smyers said. "But they also want a family, and that probably means taking time off, and making dinner. I'm rushing through here, taking the most credits you can take without paying extra, because I want to do some amazing things, and establish myself as a career woman, before I settle down."

Her male classmates, she said, feel less pressure.

"The men don't seem to hustle as much," Ms. Smyers said. "I think it's a male entitlement thing. They think they can sit back and relax and when they graduate, they'll still get a good job. They seem to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they'll be fine."

Such differences were apparent in the 2005 National Survey of Student Engagement. While the survey of 90,000 students at 530 institutions relies on self-reporting, it is used by many colleges to measure themselves against other institutions.

Men were significantly more likely than women to say they spent at least 11 hours a week relaxing or socializing, while women were more likely to say they spent at least that much time preparing for class. More men also said they frequently came to class unprepared.

Linda Sax, an associate professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found similar gender differences in her study of 17,000 men and women at 204 co-ed colleges and universities.

Using data from U.C.L.A.'s Higher Education Research Institute annual studies, she found that men were more likely than women to skip classes, not complete their homework and not turn it in on time.

"Women do spend more time studying and their grades are better," Professor Sax said, "but their grades are better even more than the extra studying time would account for."

Researchers say such differences make sense, given boys' experience in their earlier school years. And some experts argue that what is being seen as a boy problem is actually maleness itself, with the noisy, energetic antsiness and high jinks of young boys now redefined as a behavior problem by teachers who do not know how to handle them.

There is also an economic rationale for men to take education less seriously. In the early years of a career, Laura Perna of the University of Pennsylvania has found, college increases women's earnings far more than men's.

"That's the trap," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "In the early years, young men don't see the wage benefit. They can sell their strength and make money."

Lingering Money Worries

At Greensboro, where more than two-thirds of the students are female, and about one in five is black, many young men say they are torn between wanting quick money and seeking the long-term rewards of education.

"A lot of my friends made good money working in high school, in construction or as electricians, and they didn't go to college, but they're doing very well now," said Mr. Daniels, the Greensboro student, who works 25 to 30 hours a week. "One of my best friends, he's making $70,000, he's got his own truck and health benefits. The honest truth is, I feel weird being a college student and having no money."

Mr. Kohn said it was, literally, an accident that he landed at Greensboro.

"In high school, I had a G.P.A. of 1.9 and I never took the SAT's because I knew I wasn't going to college," he said. "If you don't have goals, you don't set yourself up to be disappointed."

But soon after high school, Mr. Kohn was in a serious car crash, and discovered in rehabilitation that the state would pay for community college. To his surprise he did well enough to transfer to Greensboro, where he now plans to pursue a master's degree. But when Mr. Kohn overheard a freshman woman describing her plans, including four summer school courses to help her get a master's in education a bit earlier, he was bemused.

"For a freshman to be in such a hurry, it seems a little obsessive," he said.

Many of the young women studying at Greensboro have older brothers without college degrees, or younger brothers with little interest in college.

The seven children of the Thompson family of Oxford, N.C., embody the gender differences regarding education.

There are three men and four women in the family, ranging in age from 36 to 23. Christina and Lynette, the two youngest, are both at Greensboro. The two oldest daughters went to college, too. But none of the sons got college degrees: one is a truck driver, one is autistic and living at home and one is a floor manager at a Research Triangle company.

"I think women feel more pressure to achieve," said Christina Thompson, a political science major who plans to go to law school.

Right, said her youngest sister.

"In the past, black women in the South couldn't do much except clean, pick cotton or take care of someone's children," Lynette Thompson said. "I think from our mother we got the feeling we should try to use the opportunities that are available to us now."

They and many other women at Greensboro say it is not bad to be on a campus with twice as many women as men because it encourages them to stick to their studies without the distraction of dating.

Maybe, said Ashleigh Pelick, a freshman who is dating a marine she met before college — but she teased a friend, Madison Barringer: "You know you'll go crazy if you never have another boyfriend before you graduate."

Ms. Barringer, a 19-year-old whose parents did not go to college, laughed. But she did acknowledge the gender imbalance as a possible problem.

"I know it sounds picky, but I don't think I'd marry someone without a college degree," she said. "I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation."

Creating a balance of men and women is now an issue for all but the most elite colleges, whose huge applicant pools let them fill their classes with any desired mix of highly-qualified men and women But for others, it is a delicate issue. Colleges want balance, both for social reasons and to ensure that they can attract a broad mix of applicants. But they do not want an atmosphere in which talented, hard-working women share classes with less qualified, less engaged men.

The calculus is different at different institutions. By administrators' accounts, American University has been relatively unconcerned to see its student body tipping female, faster than most others.

The admissions office said that its decisions were gender blind, and that it accepted a larger share of female applicants. In an interview, Ivy Broder, the interim provost, seemed surprised, but not bothered, that American had a higher proportion of women than Vassar College, which formerly admitted only women.

American has no engineering school and no football team; it is a campus where the Democrats' organization is Democratic Women and Friends; "The Vagina Monologues" sells out at annual performances; and almost 1,000 people turned out for the Breastival, a women's health fair.

The faculty is attracting more and more women: a majority of the professors now on the tenure track are female.

Women on campus say there is great female solidarity. What there is not much of, said Gail Short Hanson, the director of campus life, is a dating scene.

Said Ms. Hanson: "If there's a dance, like the Founder's Day dance in February, do the women get their hair done? Yes. Do they get their nails done? Yes. But do they have a date? Probably not. So who do they dance with? Whoever wants to dance."

If American University is comfortable being largely female, that is not the case on Dickinson College's charming but isolated campus in central Pennsylvania. At a time when most colleges are becoming increasingly female, Dickinson has raised its proportion of men. Even rarer is that Dickinson has publicly discussed its quest for gender balance.

The Goal: More Male Students

Robert Massa, vice president for enrollment, began campaigning for more male students shortly after he arrived at Dickinson in 1999 and discovered that only 36 percent of the incoming freshmen were male and that the college had accepted 73 percent of the women who applied, but only 53 percent of the men.

Dickinson adapted to the growing female majority by starting a women's center, adding a women's studies major and offering courses on Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

In his effort to attract men, Mr. Massa made sure that the admissions materials included plenty of pictures of young men and athletics. Dickinson began highlighting its new physics, computer science and math building, and started a program in international business. Most fundamental, Dickinson began accepting a larger proportion of its male applicants.

"The secret of getting some gender balance is that once men apply, you've got to admit them," Mr. Massa said. "So did we bend a little bit? Yeah, at the margin, we did, but not to the point that we would admit guys who couldn't do the work."

Longtime Dickinson administrators say that at isolated campuses with their own social worlds, gender balance is especially important.

"When there were fewer men, the environment was not as safe for women," said Joyce Bylander, associate provost. "When men were so highly prized that they could get away with things, some of them become sexual predators. It was an unhealthy atmosphere for women."

In education circles, Mr. Massa is sometimes accused of practicing unfair affirmative action for boys. He has a presentation called "What's Wrong With You Guys?" in which he says that Dickinson does not accept a greater proportion of male than female applicants, and that women still get more financial aid.

"Is this affirmative action?" Mr. Massa said. "Not in the legal sense." He says that admissions to a liberal arts college is more art than science, a matter of crafting a class with diverse strengths.

Mr. Massa reshaped Dickinson in one year. Of the freshmen admitted in 2000, 43 percent were male, and in recent years Dickinson's student body has been about 44 percent male. This year, Dickinson admitted an equal share of the male and the female applicants.

In the Dickinson cafeteria on a spring afternoon, the byplay between two men and two women could provide a text on gender differences. The men, Dennis Nelson and Victor Johnson, African-American football players nearing the end of their junior year, teased each other about never wanting to be seen in the library. They talked about playing "Madden," a football video game, six hours a day, about how they did not spend much time on homework.

"A lot of women want a 4.0 average, and they'll work for it," Mr. Nelson said. "I never wanted it because it's too much work to be worth it. And a lot of women, they have everything planned out for the next three years."

Mr. Johnson jumped in: "Yeah, and it boggles my mind because I don't have my life planned for the next 10 minutes. Women see the long-term benefits, they take their classes seriously, and they're actively learning. We learn for tests. With us, if someone calls the night before and says there's going to be a test, we study enough for a C."

His female friends offered their assessment. "They're really, really smart, and they think they don't have to work," Glenda Cabral said.

But they do. After two years of good grades, Mr. Johnson this year failed Spanish and Arab-Israeli relations.

"He called me the night before the test and asked who Nasser was," Julie Younes said, rolling her eyes.

At Dickinson, as elsewhere, men are overrepresented among the problem students. Of 33 students on probation this year, all but six were male. They account for most disciplinary actions, too.

"If it's outside-the-line behavior, boys are pretty much the ones doing it," Ms. Bylander said. "This generation, and especially the boys, is technology-savvy but interpersonally challenged. They've been highly structured, highly programmed, with organized play groups and organized sports, and they don't know much about how to run their own lives."

Disengagement Is Noticed

Men are underrepresented when it comes to graduation and honors. Eighty-three percent of women who were Dickinson freshmen in 2001 graduated four years later, compared with 75 percent of the men. Dickinson women, who made up just over half of last year's graduates, got slightly more than two-thirds of the cum laude, magna and summa degrees.

Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college. The disengagement of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures. Japan, over the last decade, has seen the emergence of "hikikomori" — young men withdrawing to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.

At Dickinson, some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills. Each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.

This spring, Rebecca Hammell, dean of freshman and sophomores, counseled one such young man to withdraw.

"He was in academic trouble from the start," Ms. Hammell said. "He was playing games till 3, 4, 5 in the morning, in an almost compulsive way. From early in the year, his teachers reported that he was either not coming to class or falling asleep once he was there. I checked with the Residential Life office, and they said he was in his room all the time."

Of course, female behavior has its own extremes. In freshman women, educators worry about eating disorders and perfectionism.

But among the freshman men, the problems stem mostly from immaturity.

"There was so much freedom when I got here, compared to my very structured high school life, that I kept putting things off," said Greg Williams, who just finished his freshman year. "I wouldn't do much work and I played a lot of Halo. I didn't know how to wake up on time without a mom. I had laundry problems. I shrank all my clothes and had to buy new ones."

Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising them.

Whether the male advantage will persist even as women's academic achievement soars is an open question. But many young men believe that, once in the work world, they will prevail.

"I think men do better out in the world because they care more about the power, the status, the C.E.O. job," Mr. Kohn said. "And maybe society holds men a little higher."

    At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust, NYT, 9.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html

As Barrier Comes Down,

a Muslim Split Remains

June 25, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

SAN FRANCISCO, June 24 — During Friday prayers at San Francisco's largest downtown mosque, Sevim Kalyoncu, a young Turkish-American writer, used to resent that the imam never addressed the women, as if his message was not intended for them. But the sermons underwent a sudden change when the Islamic Society of San Francisco took the controversial step of tearing down the barrier separating male and female worshippers.

"He was always addressing the brothers during the Friday sermon," Ms. Kalyoncu said. "Now we hear 'brothers and sisters' because he can see us. Before, I felt very distant, but now it seems that women are part of the group. It's a first step."

Even after the slapdash, 8-foot wall across the back of the Darussalam mosque was demolished as part of a renovation last fall, however, the 400-member congregation remained divided.

After the demolition, a small knot of veiled women marched in brandishing a hand-lettered cardboard sign that read "We Want the Wall." Several men who pray at the mosque — on the third floor of an old theater in a particularly sleazy stretch of the city's Tenderloin district — are still grumbling, and some of them even decamped for a rival mosque. But the wall stayed down.

The norm in the United States and Canada — not to mention in the larger Muslim world — is to separate the women, if not bar them entirely. A small if determined band of North American Muslims, mostly younger women, have been challenging the practice, however, labeling the separation of men and women imported cultural baggage rather than a fulfillment of a religious commandment. They argue that while Muslims brag that Islam grants more rights to women than other religions do, the opposite is true.

"I am positive there will be an American Islamic identity that is separate from what you see in the Middle East and the rest of the Islamic world," said Souleiman Ghali, a founding member of the Islamic Society of San Francisco and the main force behind the wall's removal.

"We can discuss things that would be taboo in different countries," added Mr. Ghali, 47, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon when he was 20 and now runs a copy business in downtown San Francisco. "Here we can challenge ideas or change them, and there is no religious authority to come in with the power of the government to shut us down, accusing us of being infidels contradicting thousands of years of the religious norm."

In Regina, Saskatchewan, Zarqa Nawaz was so incensed when her 200-member mosque shunted the women into a small, dark room behind a one-way mirror that she made a documentary on the subject.

The film, "Me and the Mosque," was financed by the National Film Board of Canada and broadcast on Canadian national television in April. It will appear on two American satellite channels, Link TV and Free Speech TV, starting July 16.

Mrs. Nawaz said the issue had broader implications.

"The barriers have become a metaphor for keeping the women secluded in other ways, to having no role in running the community," she said.

In 2001, a survey by the Council on American-Islamic Relations of more than 1,200 mosques found that 66 percent of them required women to pray behind a partition or in a separate room, up from 52 percent in 1994. Another study, spearheaded by the Islamic Social Services Association of Canada, found that mosques generally "relegate women to small, dingy, secluded, airless and segregated quarters with their children."

Islamic scholars and women activists say they believe the trend has accelerated since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, attributing it to a newly pervasive insecurity on the part of North American Muslims who have counteracted it through a staunch adherence to tradition.

"There is a sense that there is a crusade out there against Islam, that Islam is under siege and we have to hold steadfast to our righteous ways more than ever," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a prominent Islamic jurist known for his moderate interpretations.

Dr. Abou El Fadl said the practice began in 18th-century Saudi Arabia, where the austere Wahhabi sect of Islam started walling off or banning women from mosques. (He added that the modern spread of Wahhabism is one facet of the pervasiveness of Saudi financial support for Muslim institutions worldwide.)

Mrs. Nawaz's film takes an alternately light-hearted and serious look at the arguments on both sides.

"In Islam, mixing is not encouraged; there is no mixing between sexes, and there are all kinds of reasons for that," Ghassan Joundi, the president of the Manitoba Islamic Association, says in the film. In Dr. Joundi's mosque, the men first erected a barrier with shutters, then nailed them shut.

At the Darussalam mosque, the dispute over the wall was just one skirmish in a larger battle over the entire tenor of the mosque. Mr. Ghali and other leaders at the mosque fired an imam they deemed overly militant, not least because he wanted to make the barrier between the sexes even more pronounced. The imam went to court, winning more than $400,000 in a wrongful dismissal suit, and then opened a competing mosque around the corner, where the women still worship behind a wall.

But Mr. Ghali and other mosque leaders say they believe North America provides fertile ground for melding the best of all cultural traditions because the Muslim population is so diverse.

"You can't take a tradition in Pakistan, Somalia or Egypt and bring it to America and make it part of the law; it doesn't make sense," said Mr. Ghali, who resigned as president of the mosque's board in February. "It's one of those cultural things that many immigrants brought from overseas without giving it much thought. It's time to get rid of those bad habits."

That outlook incited an exodus by some worshippers, and some who stayed have complained that a clique of "ayatollahs" who brook no dissent now run Darussalam.

"I don't want to be distracted by ladies in the back when I am praying," said Adel al-Dalali, 40, a Yemeni cab driver who prays at Darussalam, noting that mosques in his homeland were built with a mezzanine reserved for women. "Even if it is more culture than religious tradition, we feel it's needed."

At the back of the mosque, some of the roughly 30 women worshippers agreed. "As a Muslim woman, I was more at peace praying behind the wall," said Zeinab al-Andea, a 50-year-old Yemeni who spoke only Arabic. "As a veiled woman, I don't want to mix with men. It's a beautiful mosque, but I wish there was a wall."

The mosque occupies the top floor of a building that was filled mostly with sweatshops until 1991, when the Islamic Society moved in. The recent renovations turned the mosque into one large room flooded with light. Broad green stripes on the red carpet show the faithful where to line up, and, in a nod to tradition, men and women still do not pray shoulder to shoulder.

The wall across the back was replaced with small printed signs reading "Sisters Prayer Area Only Behind This Sign." The aim of knocking down the wall was not for the sexes to mingle, but to have comparable access to the imam.

Outside, the neighborhood is rife with all manner of vice. Intoxicated men and women occasionally stagger into one of the many liquor stores. Across Market Street, a pornography store called Sin City exhorts passers-by to "See the Beauty, Touch the Magic."

Yet a dedicated group of women who support the change at Darussalam navigate their way to the mosque each Friday.

These women say they hated the wall. With it, they had trouble hearing the sermon and often fell out of sync with the prayer movements. Distracted, some say they gave up praying and instead just gossiped or drank tea.

Proponents of barriers in mosques tend to argue that the Prophet Muhammad's wives, who inhabited a series of rooms attached to the main mosque at Medina, spoke to the faithful from behind a tentlike curtain. They also say a distinct space for women assures they will not have to jostle with men.

Muslim rituals are guided by the Koran and the Hadith, tomes that detail Islam as it was practiced in the prophet's time. Advocates and some religious scholars say the books support the women. Muhammad emphasized that the rules for his wives were distinct from those for other women, they note, and he never resorted to a barrier, despite similar debate in the seventh century.

Some early adherents of Islam showed up late for prayers so they could stay in the back and ogle the women's behinds, even penning bawdy odes to the sight, said Dr. Abou El Fadl, the U.C.L.A. scholar, so Mohamed recommended that all men pray at the front of their mosques. None of Islam's three holiest mosques — Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and those in Mecca and Medina — originally had barriers between the sexes.

"Men try to justify it now by creating arguments that are ludicrous, like saying that men back then were more moral," said Mrs. Nawaz, the filmmaker, a 38-year-old mother of four. "This is completely bogus. The men were exactly the same back then when it came to being distracted. The prophet didn't deal with it by separation, he dealt with it by education."

    As Barrier Comes Down, a Muslim Split Remains, NYT, 25.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/us/25muslim.html

Women Have Seen It All on Subway,

Unwillingly

June 24, 2006
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

It is a hidden reality of the New York City subway system, and perhaps mass transit systems everywhere since the first trolley car took to the tracks. It begins with a pinch or a shove, someone standing too close. But it can be much worse.

This week, as the Police Department announced the arrest of 13 men charged with groping and flashing women in the subways, women around the city nodded. Yes, they said, this had happened to them. Yesterday. Last month. Last fall. Twenty years ago.

"Every girl I know has at least one story," said Barbara Vencebi, 23, a studio photographer standing outside the No. 6 train station at 116th Street in East Harlem yesterday.

It is a crime abetted by the peculiar landscape of the underworld that is the subway system, by the anonymity of a crowded car where everybody is avoiding eye contact. And by the opportunity for a quick escape at the next stop, to disappear behind a pillar, into a tunnel, up an escalator.

An impromptu survey of riders during the morning rush yesterday found that, for many women who have experienced it, the worst part of the crime is the sense of helplessness. What is the right way to react to a humiliating, but not life-threatening, situation? Should you announce to an entire car of strangers that you have just been violated?

Most of the time, the women said, they seethe inwardly but say nothing.

"I looked back and I couldn't do anything because a lot of people were behind me," said Suany Baca, 32, a waitress who was going up the stairs at 86th Street in the No. 6 train station last November, when she was groped by a man who passed her going down.

"I pretended like it didn't happen," she said. "I don't know what they get out of it."

Those who single out women on the subways do not care about race, if yesterday's interviews were any indication — black, Asian, Hispanic and white women all had stories to tell. But they do seem to discriminate by age.

Most of the women who reported recent incidents were in their 20's and younger. But the experience, women said, is so universal, and so scarring, that they continue to feel paranoid and to put on their body armor — the big bag, the bad face — no matter how old they get.

Women know the drill. Just as some men reflexively check to see if they have their wallets on a crowded train, women check their bodies.

Pull in your backside and your front. Wedge a large bag for protection between yourself and the nearest anonymous male rider, who might, just might, be planning something. Put on your fiercest face, and brace yourself for contact that seems too deliberate to be accidental, too prolonged to be random.

And not just in New York. Mexico City and Tokyo have reacted to subway gropers by instituting all-female subway cars. But as one New York woman said yesterday, wouldn't that make a nice target?

The crackdown in New York followed a number of highly publicized cases in which women helped the police arrest flashers by snapping pictures of them with their cellphone cameras.

Some women said yesterday that they did not expect the police effort — 13 suspected gropers and flashers were arrested over 36 hours last month — to make a big dent in the problem. But, they added, it was a start.

"I feel better they caught these guys," said Juliette Fairley, 35, an actress who said that she encountered a flasher on her N train at 42nd Street not long ago. "But there will always be people out there like this."

Some crime and subway experts with long memories offered a cautionary tale yesterday. A subway police squad in 1983 and 1984 looking for lewd behavior led to the false arrest of scores of men, most of them black and Hispanic. The men were accused of "bumping," the jargon for men who rubbed up against women, and other petty crimes.

The arrests turned out to be part of a scheme by transit police officers to inflate their productivity and win promotion, and it became a major scandal. "It is extremely hard in a crowded subway station to tell right from wrong when somebody is up close to somebody else," Richard Emery, a lawyer who won a class-action suit on behalf of the falsely arrested men, said yesterday.

Any sting operation, he said, has to be carefully planned. Stan Fischler, a subway historian and author of "The Subway and the City," made a similar point. The IRT cars of the kind used on the No. 1 line, he said, are skinnier than those used on the IND and BMT lines, and it is almost impossible during the morning and evening rush not to rub up against someone. "Half the time you don't know whether it's accidental or not," he said.

Jenna Caccaro, 22, a fashion student who lives in Brooklyn, said she was first flashed on the subway when she was 15. She thought it might have been because she was wearing her Catholic school uniform. "I thought that maybe I'd done something to attract him," she said, "but my family reassured me he was just a sleaze."

Sara Payne, 25, of Manhattan, who takes the No. 1 train to work for a jewelry company in the Bronx, said she has been flashed about six times on the subway in the eight years she has lived in New York. She said it happened more when she was a freshman in college than it does now.

"Maybe I'm a little more confident now," she said, "so people are less prone to try and intimidate me."

Vivian Lynch, 68, used to take the F train home to Queens. She shivered at the memory. "It happened to me in the 70's," she said. "Men used to touch women on the train and stand close to them and ruin their clothes."

In some ways, groping seems almost an accepted part of subway culture. Stephanie Vullo, 43, said she had dealt many times with men rubbing up against her or trying to touch her on crowded No. 4 or 5 trains in the morning when she takes her daughter to school. "It's worse in the summer months when everyone is wearing less clothing," she said. "The first time I turned around and yelled at the guy, but with my daughter, I don't want to get her upset."

Many women said they were not so much frightened by the subway encounters as they were appalled that men would do something so pathetic.

Like Ms. Fairley, the actress. "All of a sudden," she said, "this man moved into my frame of reference, and I was staring at a penis. I couldn't believe it."

Ms. Fairley said she was embarrassed, but felt even worse, in a way, for the man. "They need help, bless their hearts," she said.

Sarah Garland, Kate Hammer and Emily Vasquez

contributed reporting for this article.

    Women Have Seen It All on Subway, Unwillingly, NYT, 24.6.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/24/nyregion/24harass.html