...North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students. ...

Students interviewed here said they believed their mating rituals reflected those of college students anywhere. But many of them — men and women alike — said that the lopsided population tends to skew behavior.

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Labels: culture, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, men, universities, women

posted by Eve at 11:22 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

My parents read this book as they were considering separating. It convinced them that there was no reason to resolve their differences, and that our family would be somehow stronger. It absolutely gives unhappy people the unfounded expectation that if they can just be friendly with each other, negative effects
can be completely avoided. In the end it made my parents separation all the more painful for me and my adult siblings, because it built an expectation that divorce would be easy on everyone. When it wasn’t, the only response was to blame us kids, because they were working really hard at their “good” divorce.

posted by Elizabeth Marquardt at 8:57 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...In Dr. Jemmott’s research, only about a third of the students who participated in a weekend abstinence-only class started having sex within the next 24 months, compared with about half who were randomly assigned instead to general health information classes, or classes teaching only safer sex. Among those assigned to comprehensive sex-education classes, covering both abstinence and safer sex, about 42 percent began having sex.

Dr. Jemmott’s research followed 662 African-American students at urban middle schools, who were paid $20 a session to attend the classes, plus follow-up and evaluation sessions. The abstinence-only classes covered HIV, abstinence and ways to resist the pressure to have sex.

“Because African-Americans tend to have a higher rate of early sexual initiation than others, we thought that within two years, a reasonable number would start having sex,” Dr. Jemmott said. “If we went younger, we couldn’t show that intervention works.”

The research, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, appears just as the Obama administration is eliminating federal financing for abstinence-only programs, and starting a pregnancy-prevention initiative that will finance programs that have been shown in scientific studies to be effective. ...

Ms. Brown noted that the abstinence-only classes in the Jemmott study centered on people with an average age of 12 and that unlike the federally supported abstinence programs now in use, did not advocate abstinence until marriage.

The classes also did not portray sex negatively or suggest that condoms are ineffective, and contained only medically accurate information. Dr. Jemmott’s abstinence-only course was designed for the research, and is not in current use in schools.

Labels: abstinence, culture, sex

posted by Eve at 9:01 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

The father will be allowed to take time off work to replace the last three months of his partner's nine-month maternity leave.

He would be eligible during the three month period to statutory Government pay of £123 a week.

After nine months, fathers will even have the right the stay off work unpaid for another three months.

Ministers believe it will allow mothers who earn more than their partners to return earlier to work than has otherwise been possible.

Government data has shown that around 350,000 expectant mothers a year are at work. Around two thirds return to work.

It represents a victory for Harriet Harman, the Equalities Minister, who has championed the cause in a bitter Cabinet battle with Lord Mandelson who has fought for business to be spared the extra administrative and financial burden.

Under the current laws, fathers are allowed two weeks paternity leave when their child is born. That will continue, but after the mother has spent six months of leave she can then return to work and allow the father to take the remaining three month’s statutory paid leave and up to six months in total off work.

The new paternity changes will come into force in April next year and parents will be able to use the new transferable right to leave for children born after that date.

Labels: Fathers, United Kingdom, work/family policy

posted by Eve at 10:10 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...When my cellphone rang a week later I was already crying, driving to the airport to attend my aunt’s funeral. My boyfriend had dumped me suddenly that morning via e-mail after I’d just flown 3,000 miles to visit him and his family. When my doctor said, “I have bad news,” I pulled over.

“You’re in premature ovarian failure,” she said. “It’s causing early onset menopause. I don’t know how to tell you this: You won’t be able to have children.”

“O.K.,” I said. I was waiting for the next part of the sentence, the medical way around the problem. I had low thyroid function; I took a pill. I suffered from depression; a few drugs made it bearable. In my experience, medical lemons were almost always followed by a prescription for lemonade. I felt strangely calm, detached, as though we were talking about characters on television.

She said, with believable regret, “I’m very sorry to have to tell you this.” ...

They pitied me, blamed themselves. They had always assumed there would be grandchildren, just as I had always assumed there would be children. They were suffering a loss as well. They were disappointed, however much they tried to disguise it. It felt like they were disappointed in me.

Labels: infertility

posted by Eve at 10:06 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A one-time lesbian couple will have shared custody of the child they had together and raised before splitting up, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Jan. 21.

The high court in Frankfort approved the couple's joint custody agreement and ruled that one of the women, Arminta Jane Mullins, acted as a "de facto parent" with her partner, Phyllis Dianne Picklesimer. ...

Picklesimer gave birth to the boy in 2005. The couple filed a joint custody agreement in February 2006 in Garrard County and split up two months later. Picklesimer denied Mullins contact with the boy that September, prompting Mullins to go to court to see the child.

Justice Wil Schroeder wrote for the court's majority that the women made multiple decisions about the child before and after he was born, with Mullins caring for the boy while the couple was together and for five months after they split.

"This would distinguish the nonparent acting as a parent to the child from a grandparent, a baby sitter, or a boyfriend or girlfriend of the parent, who watched the child for the parent, but who was never intended by the parent to be doing so in the same capacity of another parent," Schroeder wrote. ...

Eighteen states recognize "de facto parents" over the objections of fit biological parents: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, West Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Labels: de facto parenting, Kentucky

posted by Eve at 10:00 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT