Over a thousand U.S. women are killed each year by a current or former intimate partner, Marie Tessier reports today. Two million a year are injured. A sexual assault occurs every two minutes. Fifth in "The Memo" series on the status of U.S. women.

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Here's today's update:

IN THE STATES

Intimate Violence Remains a Big Killer of Women

By Marie Tessier
WeNews correspondent

GRAY, Maine (WOMENSENEWS)--With groceries in her car, Jennifer Lessard apparently planned to make several quick stops after work before picking up her two school-age sons one afternoon in May. Instead, she became the 13th victim of domestic homicide in Maine this year, part of a murder trend that's on pace to exceed every other year since the state began compiling records in 1971.

In an all-too-common scenario in the United States--where a woman's risk of being murdered by an intimate partner is highest after leaving an abusive relationship--the 40-year-old pharmacist attempted to pick up her belongings at the home of a former boyfriend, whom she had recently left.

Lessard was found dead there, with a gunshot wound to the head. Her boyfriend was also dead, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and left a suicide note, according to state police.

Domestic violence is a leading cause of death for women ages 15-44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. It is a leading cause of death of pregnant women, mortality research shows. And African American and Native American women are at the highest risk of intimate partner homicide.

Sexual violence is so prevalent that it touches every family in the United States, advocates say.

Estimates show that 272,000 sexual assaults against people age 12 and older occurred in 2006.

Crime Drop Benefits Men Most

Since violent crime rates peaked in the early 1990s men have benefited most from a downward trend that has left Americans safer overall.

In the three decades from 1976 to 2005, the number of men killed by female partners has dropped precipitously, from about 1,300 to 329. But homicides of women by male partners has declined far less, dropping from around 1,500 to about 1,200, figures from the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics show.

Those female homicide figures reached their lowest point of 1,155 in 2004, but climbed slightly to 1,181 in 2005, the latest year available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The bloody trail of those deaths, along with injuries, crisscrosses the nation each year and overshadows women's daily lives.

Nearly one-third of all U.S. women report experiencing violence from a current or former spouse or boyfriend at some point in their lives, according to the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund.

The impact of violence spreads through families, health care services and the workplace, and is associated with far higher disease risk.

Women who have experienced domestic violence are 80 percent more likely to have a stroke, 70 percent more likely to have heart disease, 60 percent more likely to have asthma and 70 percent more likely to drink heavily than women who have not experienced intimate partner violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Declaring an Emergency

At least one governor is putting the problem on the front burner.

In early June Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick declared a "domestic violence emergency" in his state, where deaths at the hands of a domestic partner nearly tripled to 42 in 2007 from 15 in 2005.

So far in 2008, domestic crime has killed 19 people in Massachusetts, according to Boston-based Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.

Patrick signed legislation creating statewide guidelines for hospitals treating victims of violence and called for strengthened training of police officers in the state.

Maine is also taking steps, says Lois Galgay Reckitt, a longtime advocate for battered women in the state who serves on the board of the Denver-based National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

All police officers will be required to complete domestic violence training next year to be certified, she says, and the plan expands training requirements that are now common in most states.

But while access to crisis services and an informed police response are improving for battered women in Maine and elsewhere, Reckitt says more action is needed.

"We need to start focusing on prosecution of domestic violence offenses as a matter of homicide prevention," says Reckitt, who serves on the board of the Maine Criminal Justice Academy in Vassalboro. "Incarceration might have an impact, but we are having trouble in Maine getting the prosecution to happen."

Not Enough Programs to Help Women

Esta Soler, president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, which carries out public health campaigns for the federal Centers for Disease Control, agrees with Reckitt and says health care providers can also do more. "Too few women are screened for violence and offered the help and referrals they need."

Despite the ongoing high level of violence, the 2006 National Crime Victimization Survey found declines in sexual and domestic violence since passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, which distributed over $570 million in funding to anti-violence programs across the country this year.

"There's still a sexual assault every two minutes in the United States, but the Violence Against Women Act has helped focus police, prosecutors and judges on the seriousness of the crime," says Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, an anti-sexual violence advocacy group in Washington, D.C. "The progress shows that we need to fully fund the programs, because the ones that have been funded are working."

But other leaders in the field challenge the 2006 data and any interpretation of it that suggests sexual violence is ebbing.

"I don't think we can say that violence is declining when the number of people seeking services continues to grow or stay the same," says Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence in Denver. "It could be that the numbers aren't being counted right, or it could be that women have stopped using the justice system, but the experience in the field is not that women are safer."

Sue Else, executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, says the 2006 national survey misses thousands of instances of violence because it is not safe for battered women to respond truthfully to questions about the violence that can permeate--or threaten--their lives.

"The National Crime Victimization Survey is not an accurate reflection of what we know about domestic violence prevalence," says Else, which tracked requests for services for one day in 2007, and found that service providers were stretched beyond capacity. "More than 7,700 requests for services went unmet in a 24-hour period in 2007 because there simply weren't enough resources to help them."

Women in college are particularly vulnerable to gender violence. Over the course of a college career between 20 and 25 percent of female students will be sexually assaulted, according to a 2000 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Soler and other advocates share a time-worn perspective on violence against women: Preventing violence means transforming a culture and its institutions.

"Changing attitudes is our greatest long-term challenge," Soler says. "But we are making progress and we can do even more."

Marie Tessier writes frequently for Women's eNews and the Women's Media Center about violence against women and legal affairs.

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The Gates Foundation turns its attention toward female farmers. Also in this week's Cheers and Jeers column, raped teens in Poland and Romania face difficulty obtaining abortions.

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Great NEWS about Women's eNews: The Los Angeles Press Club awarded a column by our Sandy Kobrin on domestic violence and star athletes second place in the best online column category AND Catherine Makino was elected president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan--only the second time in the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan's 63-year history that a woman has been elected President.

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Here's today's update:

CHEERS AND JEERS OF THE WEEK

Gates Aids Farmers; Raped Teens Denied Abortions

By Besa Luci
WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)--

Cheers

The Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will prioritize female farmers in Africa and Asia through its agricultural program in an effort to reduce poverty and boost agriculture, the Associated Press reported June 24. The foundation's program gives $800 million in grants yearly on global health. In Africa 80 percent of food production is controlled by women; in South Asia 60 percent of food production is.

The announcement came a day before Bill Gates stepped away from his 33-year tenure as the founder of Microsoft. Once the wealthiest man in the world, Gates will now focus on the foundation's charitable work, particularly the fight against poverty and malaria, the Economist reported June 26.

More News to Cheer This Week:

• On June 23, President George W. Bush nominated Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody to take over the Army Materiel Command as a four-star general, which will make her the first U.S. women to reach the high military ranking. The command is responsible for equipping and arming all Army soldiers. Currently there are 57 active-duty female generals in the armed forces, five of whom are lieutenant generals.
• Nepal's 601-seat parliament met for the first time at the end of May with 191 female members, the Inter Press Service reported June 24. The parliament recently dissolved the monarchy following elections in December that implemented a 33 percent quota for women. Thirty women won seats, and 161 women were allocated seats, increasing their ranks significantly from just 12 female members in 1999.
• The United Nations Security Council unanimously approved a resolution June 19 calling rape a war crime and component of genocide, the Associated Press reported. Sexual violence has been widespread in conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, while in some cases U.N. peacekeepers have faced charges as well.
• The number of states participating in the Bush's administration push for abstinence education is down 40 percent over the past two years, as skeptical states are rejecting millions of federal dollars, the Associated Press reported June 24. Around $50 million has been budgeted for 2008, and currently 28 states are in the program. Iowa and Arizona are the latest states to refuse their share of federal grants beginning with the next fiscal year. A congressional study last year concluded the programs were ineffective.
• Sixty percent of U.S. Reform Jewish rabbinical students and 84 percent of those studying to become cantors are female, reported the Boston Globe June 22. Girls are also outnumbering boys 2-to-1 in youth group programs and summer camps.
• On June 23, Dallas archeologist Kathleen Gilmore became the first woman to receive the Texas Governor's Award for Historic Preservation, the state's highest honor for historical work, the Dallas Morning News reported June 26. Gilmore, 93, had first been a geologist for 25 years and now is known for discovering the historic site where French explorer La Salle built Fort St. Louis.
• Women's eNews Tokyo correspondent Catherine Makino will become president of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan July 1. The club defends freedom of the press and promotes friendly relations between Japan and other countries. Makino is the second woman in the club's 63-year history to be president.

Jeers

Two separate rape cases that left an 11-year-old Romanian and 14-year-old Polish teen pregnant have raised controversies in their countries, the Irish Times reported June 18.

The Romanian girl was initially denied an abortion in her home country because her pregnancy was not confirmed until after the 14th week, the time limit for the procedure in Romania unless the fetus is deformed or the mother's life is in danger. The girl was initially afraid to report her teen uncle, who allegedly raped and threatened her, but a medical panel would not allow an abortion because the crime was not proven. Now 21 weeks pregnant, her family decided to take her to Britain, where abortion is legal until the 24th week, even though the Romanian government relented in the end, the AP reported June 27.

In Poland, the 14-year-old teen was raped by an older school acquaintance. Poland allows abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy only in cases where the woman's life is in danger, the fetus is deformed, or pregnancy is the result of a crime. She is now in her 11th week but anti-choice groups are pressuring clinics to not provide an abortion, saying she has been coerced into the decision by her mother and pro-choice activists.

More News to Jeer This Week:

• A June 25 Supreme Court ruling in a domestic violence case will make it more difficult to convict abusers who murder their intimate partners. In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the testimony of a woman provided shortly before she was murdered by her boyfriend had to be excluded from consideration because the man did not have the ability to confront his accuser in court, the AP reported.
• On June 26, the Bush administration announced it will withhold $39.7 million authorized by Congress for the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, for the seventh year in a row. Since 2002, the U.S. administration has withheld a total of $325 million, charging that the U.N. agency supports coercive abortions in China as part of that nation's one-child policy, according to the American Friends for UNFPA, a nonpartisan group that supports the agency.
• In 2008 among Associated Press member papers, 94 percent of sports editors, 90 percent of assistant sports editors, 94 percent of sports columnists, 91 percent of reporters and 94 percent of copy editors and designers were male. The lack of female sports journalists resulted in an F-grade for gender on the latest report card from the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. The newspapers' sports departments, which are dominated by whites, received an overall C grade for diversity.
• The number of baby girls born and surviving in India are at a historic low as female fetuses are aborted or baby girls left to die, the BBC reported June 21. A report by the British charity ActionAid, found that under "normal" circumstances there should be about 950 girls for every 1,000 boys. But there were fewer than 800 girls for 1,000 boys in three of five states where data were collected.
• New York women's economic state is declining and they are more likely to be poor now than in 1989, according to a June 26 report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. The report examined how women in the state fare in employment, earnings, and social and economic autonomy and placed the state 40th in the country, dropping 10 places since 1989.
• Hana Adbi, 22, an Iranian activist who was involved in a campaign to gather a million signatures for greater women's rights in the country, has been sentenced to five years in prison, Reuters reported June 21. She was accused of "illegal gathering with the intention of committing a crime against the nation's security."
• Blue Shield, a California-based health insurance company, will charge women in the state higher rates for health insurance starting July 1, the Los Angeles Times reported June 22. The company says women are more prone to accidents.

Noted:

The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's death penalty for child rape June 24 in a 5-4 decision, the AP reported June 26. The case weighed whether capital punishment could be imposed in a rape case without the victim's death.

Besa Luci, a native of Kosovo, is a recent graduate of the University of Missouri's Graduate School of Journalism.

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We receive financial support from our readers, private donors, events, commercial publications that republish our material and from the following foundations. * The Bydale Foundation * The Carnegie Corporation of New York * The Charles Lawrence Keith & Clara S. Miller Foundation * The Ford Foundation * The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation * The Barbara Lee Family Foundation * The Livingry Fund of the Tides Foundation * Mary Kay Inc. * The McCormick Tribune Foundation * The Ms. Foundation * The Open Society Institute * The Rockefeller Brothers Fund * The Rockefeller Family Fund * The Sister Fund * The Starry Night Fund of Tides Foundation * The United Nations Foundation * The Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention * The W.K. Kellogg Foundation * Working Assets The donations from readers are critical to our success. They are an important measure that we are serving our audience--the yardstick that our foundation supporters will measure us by. Donate now by going to http://www.womensenews.org/support.cfm

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Landmark laws passed in the 1990s aimed at keeping guns from abusers have fallen short of their mark, say law enforcement personnel and advocates. Marie Tessier reports our latest story in our "Dangerous Trends, Innovative Responses" series.

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Please Donate Now. http://www.womensenews.org/support.cfm. Okay. We accept it. Hillary won't be the Democratic presidential nominee. That makes it all the more important to inform the convention delegates about women's issues. Women's eNews is writing The Memo on the status of U.S. women and we intend to deliver it to every single delegate. Please help get there: Donate now: http://www.womensenews.org/support.cfm

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SAFETY

Batterers Shoot Holes in Protective Gun Bans

By Marie Tessier
WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)--Early last year, Monique Vance appeared to be a case study in Washington state law enforcement managing to keep women safe.

Her estranged husband, Karl Vance--scheduled to go to trial on charges of misdemeanor domestic violence assault--was subject to a protection order. When a municipal court judge in early 2007 issued the protective order, he ordered Vance to turn over firearms to the King County Sheriff's Department.

Using model procedures, the judge notified Vance that he was barred under state and federal laws from possessing guns and risked a felony violation of federal gun laws, among other crimes. A federal conviction could carry as much as a 10-year sentence in prison.

Karl Vance turned over a firearm. It was an air pistol, according to news reports.

But two months later, in April 2007, witnesses say they heard shots fired inside an apartment building in Des Moines, Wash., and then saw Monique Vance fleeing barefoot, screaming, "He's trying to kill me," according to Karl Vance's court indictment.

Then, witnesses told investigators, Karl Vance followed his wife outside in plain view, and shot her with a .357-caliber handgun, according to court documents.

Monique Vance died on a doorstep with multiple bullet wounds in her torso. She was declared dead at the scene, court records say. Karl Vance has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge and is scheduled to go on trial later this year.

Guns Stayed in Abusers' Hands

Whatever the verdict in this case, the allegations seem all too familiar to advocates for battered women and law enforcement officials. Fourteen years after the Violence Against Women Act was passed in 1994, they say achieving a national vision of disarming domestic-violence offenders has proven elusive in most parts of the country.

"It seems like a great idea, to take guns away from batterers," says Merril Cousin, executive director of the King County Coalition Against Domestic Violence in Seattle. "It's more complicated than it sounds, because it depends on finding out that a firearm is involved, it often requires a court order, and then you have to get the order enforced."

Guns are used to kill most victims of intimate partner homicides, though the proportion has been falling, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In recent years, about 1,200 women have died annually in intimate partner homicides, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. About a third of female homicide victims in the United States are killed by a partner or former partner. Women ages 25 to 49 are at higher risk, as are African American women and Native American women.

In the Vance case, prosecutors say it is not clear exactly how Karl Vance obtained the handgun that they allege led to his wife's death. It is clear, however, that he did not own it, a spokesperson for the King County prosecutor said.

283 Million Guns

There are 283 million privately owned guns in the United States, according to the anti-gun Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Licensed firearm dealers sell more than 4 million guns each year, and up to 2 million more are sold through other venues. Some sales are unregulated.

Background checks that went into effect in 1994 are not required for all sales, and illegal gun sales are thriving, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C.

Under federal gun laws passed in the 1990s, people convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence and people subject to domestic violence protective orders were banned from possessing firearms.

That was a switch from an earlier era, when prohibitions were only placed on convicted felons that left many batterers--typically pleaded down and convicted on misdemeanor charges--still legally armed.

In the years since the breakthrough laws took effect, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, has prevented thousands of gun sales, though the records remain incomplete. In 2006 alone, nearly 10,000 firearms sales were halted because a gun buyer had a domestic violence misdemeanor conviction or was subject to a protective order, according to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Another 8,000 firearms transfers or permits were denied by state agencies conducting background checks for concealed weapons, hunting permits or other purposes, mostly using NICS data.

Few Prosecutions for Violators

But only eight offenders were prosecuted in federal courts for possessing a firearm after a domestic violence conviction in 2006, data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms indicate. That year, only 28 people nationwide were charged with falsifying information on the background check for any reason.

To hold batterers accountable, at least nine states have passed mandatory gun bans when a protection order is issued, similar to the federal ban, so that investigators and prosecutors have an easier time coordinating victim safety. At least as many states give judges the discretion to prohibit firearms, says Emily Sack, a professor of criminal law at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.

New Jersey law gives police much broader authority to find and remove weapons by requiring that a search warrant be issued with protective orders, Sack says. In Arizona, police have a detailed mechanism to seize weapons and to hold them if there is reasonable cause to believe that returning the firearms would endanger anyone in the home.

"We want to disarm the batterer before the violence escalates to the level of a felony," says Mark Hanna of the King County Firearms Forfeiture Program in Seattle, a sheriff's department agency that works with law enforcement and specialized domestic violence courts. "It is critical to victim safety that we make the misdemeanors matter."

Ed Googins, police chief in South Portland, Maine, says officers in his department do not depend on specific firearms laws. "We look for opportunities to make people safe," Googins says. "Sometimes we can do that simply by asking a victim if we can take the gun for safekeeping."

The South Portland police also say it takes every opportunity to seize weapons as evidence of a crime. "We follow up on defendants 24 or 48 hours after a call, and that's when we find violations of bail conditions or protection orders, so we can take a firearm into evidence, and that's about a third of the time," Googins says. "It's really a matter of using the laws we have available and using them to our advantage to make things safer for the victim."

Marie Tessier is an independent journalist who writes frequently about violence against women and legal affairs.

This series is supported by a special grant from Mary Kay Inc.

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@....

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We receive financial support from our readers, private donors, events, commercial publications that republish our material and from the following foundations. * The Bydale Foundation * The Carnegie Corporation of New York * The Charles Lawrence Keith & Clara S. Miller Foundation * The Ford Foundation * The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation * The Barbara Lee Family Foundation * The Livingry Fund of the Tides Foundation * Mary Kay Inc. * The McCormick Tribune Foundation * The Ms. Foundation * The Open Society Institute * The Rockefeller Brothers Fund * The Rockefeller Family Fund * The Sister Fund * The Starry Night Fund of Tides Foundation * The United Nations Foundation * The Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention * The W.K. Kellogg Foundation * Working Assets The donations from readers are critical to our success. They are an important measure that we are serving our audience--the yardstick that our foundation supporters will measure us by. Donate now by going to http://www.womensenews.org/support.cfm

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Hillary Clinton's strong presidential bid has broken barriers. But Caryl Rivers cautions that a retro cloud is also following her campaign. College admissions, court rulings, congressional votes, media narratives are all telling women to stay home.

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COMMENTARY

Anti-Hillary Message Says 'Women Go Home'

By Caryl Rivers
WeNews commentator

Editor's Note: The following is a commentary. The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily the views of Women's Enews.

(WOMENSENEWS)--The presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton has some disturbing messages for uppity women in the United States.

The reality that a woman is so close to the top political post in the country--perhaps even the world--has stirred up old ideas about the danger of female power and about woman's proper place in society. The backlash is sending a retro cloud across a number of fronts.

I'd been hearing from female friends--some of whom do not support Hillary--that the backlash surprised them.

Apparently, they missed the Wall Street Journal story on April 9 by Jonathan Kaufman and Carol Hymowitz, who wrote about the slurs and inflammatory language that many women encountered when the topic of the campaign came up at work, and which they thought had been banished from public discourse.

"Some women worry that regardless of how the election turns out," they wrote, "the resistance to Senator Clinton may embolden some men to resist women's efforts to share power with them in business, politics and elsewhere."

If Hillary were male, and had garnered so many votes, no one would be calling for a pullout.

Worrying Signs

Are we heading into a new era of resistance to female gains? There are worrying signs to suggest that the answer is yes.

They are not only found in the dust of Hillary's campaign trail, but also in the college admission practices, votes in Congress, Supreme Court decisions.

Elite schools are quietly instituting affirmative action policies for white men, so top-scoring women may not be getting into their colleges of choice.

U.S. News and World Report, using undergraduate admissions rate data collected from more than 1,400 four-year colleges and universities that participate in the magazine's rankings, found last year that over the previous 10 years many schools are maintaining their gender balance by admitting more men with lower scores than women.

"The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today's accomplished young women," Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions at Kenyon College, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last year.

Most disturbing, Delahunty told Time magazine, "was the reaction of young women. By and large they just assumed this is just how things work. Why aren't they marching in the streets? It isn't fair and women should be saying something about it not being fair."

What's the Message?

What message are girls--and boys--being given? That men and boys will always be allowed to step ahead of women, no matter how accomplished the latter?

The U.S. Congress could not even summon enough votes in April for a bill that would allow a woman to sue for sex discrimination at the time she discovered it was happening.

Pressures, meanwhile, are intensifying for women to work longer and longer hours as family-friendly policies stall. An ongoing media narrative says that women in good jobs are deserting the workplace because of a traditional pull toward home and family.

In a time when affirmative action programs for blacks and other minorities are under attack--limited by the Supreme Court and challenged by new activist groups--special privileges for white males are on the rise. Parents are seeing their high-scoring, talented girls losing out to less able boys, and this comes not just from a few isolated anecdotes.

At the same time, the political powers-that-be are sending out a message that discrimination against women in the workplace is no big deal.

When an Alabama woman sued Goodyear because she had been paid less than men doing the same work for two decades, the Supreme Court (just after the departure of Sandra Day O'Connor) ruled that she had waited too long to sue. The court said she should have brought her case within six months after her first unequal paycheck--that is, 20 years before she discovered it.

You'd think the Congress, which pays lip service to equal pay for equal work, would come racing to remedy this injustice.

What happened? The House countered the high court ruling by passing a bill that would permit lawsuits by victims of discrimination when they discover discrimination, not when the discrimination occurred. But it couldn't make it through the Senate. George Bush threatened to veto such a bill if it passed, and John McCain said he opposed it.

Media Embraces a Narrative

Meanwhile, a media narrative persists that the best and the brightest women are simply going home. They are "opting out" and becoming more traditional, feeling the pull of kids, hearth and home, their "natural" place.

Signs hoisted by hecklers at Clinton rallies --"Stop running for president and make me a sandwich," "Iron my shirt"--show the ugly underside of that sentimental version.

What's really happening, says New York University sociologist Kathleen Gerson, is that full-time paid work has come to mean 50 hours or more. That overload is what working mothers are rejecting. Women, overall, aren't "opting out" of full-time work, but are getting pushed out by an increasingly inflexible workplace. That story is not being told.

Just ask Joan C. Williams. In a report in the American Prospect in March she found the vast majority--more than 70 percent--of the newspaper stories she and others analyzed emphasized pulls rather than pushes. Women were following the pull toward home, "with little mention of how the workplace pushes them out."

This is true even though a 2004 study by researchers Pamela Stone and Meg Lovejoy found that 86 percent of highly qualified women surveyed said work-related reasons, including workplace inflexibility, were key considerations in their decisions to quit. Only 6 percent of newspaper articles that Williams reviewed identified workplace pushes as key reasons why women left work.

Put these disparate items together and you see the clear message: Women have gone too far, and they shouldn't be running for president. They belong at home, and in fact are choosing to stay home. So why shouldn't males get the college spots, and who cares about workplace discrimination?

As president Hillary Clinton could change at least some of this. That's why it's so hard to listen to the delegate-counters say her prospects are fading.

Some women are fighting back.

On May 20, the Women's Media Center launched a "Sexism Sells, But We're Not Buying It" campaign against the pervasive sexism in the media's election coverage. The group's Web site offers a petition for you to sign, chiding media outlets for their performance. "Sexism isn't a partisan issue," it says. "We're not going to let anyone hit the snooze button on this important issue!"

To which I say, "Amen!"

Boston University journalism professor Caryl Rivers is the author of "Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women."

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@....

Related Coverage:

Spotlight on 2008 Presidential Election
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=3410

Hillary's Pre-Tuesday Coverage Was Far From Super
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