Hillary Clinton Launches the Women in Public Service Project

Molly Duerig, WLP Intern

Monday, June 11^th, marked the official launch of the Women in Public Service Project (WPSP), a program created by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that aims to mentor emerging female leaders from all over the world in public policy and social justice.

 Forty-nine women from 21 different countries were selected through an application process to participate in the project. WPSP kicked off its first annual two-week series of intensive seminars, which will focus on how women can successfully lead and influence the governments and societies in which they live. Participants will also have the opportunity to network with global political leaders.

 The project is sponsored by The U.S State Department and the five remaining “Seven-Sister” schools, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Smith, and Mount Holyoke. The first summer institute will take place at Wellesley College, which is the alma mater of both Clinton and Madeline Albright, the first female Secretary of State.  The other sponsoring colleges, all leading liberal arts colleges, will host the event in the future.

Clinton’s ambitious project will further the pro-women initiative President Obama undertook when he issued the National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace and Security this past December. The Women’s Media Center explained that NAP mandated increased participation of women in the negotiation of peace treaties, as well as a promotion of women’s role in conflict prevention. This program is one that was greatly needed: only 8% of all peace treaties negotiated during the last several years involved women at all.

Furthermore, as State Department ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues Melanne Verveer pointed out, almost half of all peace agreements negotiated during the 1990s failed within five years of their passage. “Peace won’t happen if we leave out half of those who are affected by conflict and will benefit from peace,” said Verveer in support of the NAP.

Her sentiment, crucial to the birth of the WPSP, is shared by many leaders urging increased participation by women in politics. As women continue to be underrepresented in politics, we fail to hear the opinion of half of the population. This leads to a plethora of problems, including imbalanced decisions and a narrow range of expertise and perspective.

Gender equality efforts are underway worldwide. Newly-elected French president Francois Hollande appointed an equal number of women and men to the country’s 34-member cabinet for the first time in history .

Clinton’s hopes are that the WPSP will help this trend to continue on an international level. The project’s ultimate goal is for at least 50% of the world’s elected leaders to be women by the year 2050. Currently, that number is at only 17.5%. According to a Women’s Media Center article, the proportion of women to men in the U.S Congress is only 17%, even lower than the international average of 20% of parliamentary seats held by women. Clinton was quoted as saying she was embarrassed by this statistic. She also stated that, “The World Bank has found that women tend to invest more of their earnings in their families and communities than men do,” adding that “those are the kinds of instincts and priorities we would all like to see” at the government level.

If half of a society’s population fails to have proper representation in politics, the desires and goals of that society cannot be properly met. The WPSP aims to broaden the range of perspectives at the political forefront to include more women, as well as give women the resources and contacts to become effective leaders. Here at the Women’s Law Project, we support and applaud this endeavor. This is a bold and innovative approach to international policy that aims to drastically alter global leadership.

Report Released on the 40th Anniversary of Title IX

Nikki Ditto, WLP Intern

As a member of The National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education (NCWGE), the Women’s Law Project is pleased to share NCWGE’s report celebrating Title IX’s 40^th anniversary.  NCWGE is a non-profit made up of over 50 organizations dedicated to ensuring equality in education. The report gives a comprehensive look at all that has been accomplished since Title IX was adopted and all that remains to be done. The goal of the report is to “help give educators, parents, students, and lawmakers a better understanding of Title IX’s impact and challenges that remain in many areas of education.”

The report covers Title IX’s role in school athletics, as well as other crucial issues. It outlines six main areas that the act affects and impacts including “athletics; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); career and techni­cal education; sexual harassment; single-sex education; and the rights of pregnant and parenting students.” The report offers an analysis of the change that has occurred in each area over the last 40 years, and also provides suggestions and solutions for addressing the equality gaps that remain.

Title IX was passed as a portion of the Education Amendments of 1972. It states that,

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

Title IX is best known for its impact on high school and collegiate athletics. It has helped to open doors for female athletes to equal participation opportunities and to equal treatment of male and female teams. However, its reach and importance extends far beyond sports. Title IX impacts the education system as a whole and is meant to ensure equality in all areas of education.

The report found that while much has improved in terms of gender equity in education since 1972, much of Title IX is not fully implemented or enforced.  For example, pregnant and parenting students still struggle to have full and equal access to education, and their needs are often ignored (pg.55). Girls are still underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields (17). Sexual harassment is still prevalent across all grade levels, and often keeps students from fully participating in school (37). Many public schools still have sex-segregated classrooms based on faulty scientific research and stereotypes (47) Thankfully, Title IX provides students with a legal basis for challenging the inequalities they continue to face.

The Women’s Law Project has played a role in helping to enforce Title IX throughout the state of Pennsylvania. We supported more stringent and regulated handling of sexual assault cases at Penn State. We have also worked against discriminatory single-sex programs and schools in order to ensure equal access to educational opportunities for children. The WLP has fought for the rights of female students and athletes in a number of cases thanks to the passage of Title IX.

Through this report, the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education “seeks to inform the continued search for policies that will promote equal educational opportunity in all of these areas,” (2). The report lays out what must be done to establish truly equal access and to continue to improve the situation for women and girls in schools across the country. NCWGE suggests five overarching areas that must be addressed, including “awareness, enforcement, transparency, coordination, and funding” (6), as well as policy changes that effect each area of interest.

On the 40^th anniversary of Title IX, it is important to recognize the ways in which Title IX has shaped the last 40 years and how it can be better implemented in the future. Title IX’s passage did not change the world or America’s public education system overnight, and there is still work to be done. We are happy to celebrate this anniversary by looking at how we can continue to make public schools more equal for all students.

Female Stereotype Threat Hurts Women, Economy

Guest Blogger: Elizabeth Wingfield, Former WLP Intern

In an article for WeNews, Rosalind C. Barnett and Caryl Rivers demonstrate that girls still internalize stereotypes about female performance in math and science, making them less likely to pursue careers in those fields. While the percentage of women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers is rising, according to Barnett and Rivers girls need to hear earlier that there are no innate gender differences in math and science if we want to eradicate stereotype threat (“that confidence-killing burden of anxiety”) and therefore see more women  in STEM careers.

Barnett and Rivers report that a 2009 study found “that middle school girls did less well on a math test when told that boys generally did better in math than girls. Even girls who denied they held a belief in girls’ inferiority did poorly. Without the negative information, they score nearly as well as men.” Girls have proven their ability to compete with their male counterparts by taking the top prizes at Google’s first science fair and taking roughly the same number of math and science courses in middle and high school as boys. However, girls still hold a disproportionately low percentage of STEM undergraduate degrees, particularly in engineering. Even those women who do hold undergraduate STEM degrees are less likely to work in a STEM career than their male counterparts. Barnett and Rivers blame stereotype threat for this disparity.

The lack of women in STEM occupations is a “brain drain” that the US cannot afford. According to “Rebecca Blank, acting deputy secretary of the Commerce Department…the lack of women in STEM is harming U.S. ability to compete in the global innovation marketplace.” But, “fortunately…a team led by psychologist Anthony Greenwald at the University of Washington discovered that although girls in the early grades see math largely as a male preserve, they haven’t yet made the connection that ‘because I am a girl, math is not for me.’” These findings suggest that if girls are assured early enough that they are not innately worse at math because of their sex that they will be more likely to pursue jobs in STEM fields later on since they will be less likely to suffer from stereotype threat.

You can read the entire article here.

Women’s Law Project Releases Through the Lens of Equality: Eliminating Sex Bias to Improve the Health of Pennsylvania’s Women

The Women’s Law Project (WLP) released today a major report, Through the Lens of Equality: Eliminating Sex Bias to Improve the Health of Pennsylvania’s Women, linking sex bias to adverse health outcomes in women.   The release of this report coincides with National Women’s Health Week (May 13-19^th), during which time organizations around the country are raising awareness about the benefits of the health care law.

Inspired by the public debate on health care, WLP embarked on an examination of the relationship between the sex bias that women experience and their health, resulting in the publication of Through the Lens of Equality.  “As familiar as we were with ongoing bias and discrimination against women and with data on critical health measures for women, our in-depth examination of the linkage between the two truly shocked us,” said Carol Tracy, Executive Director of the Women’s Law Project.  “The focus is on Pennsylvania, however, the finding and recommendations have nationwide application,” she added.

“For all of the years that I have been involved in women’s rights and women’s health care, I have never seen the connections between health and equality more dramatically demonstrated that it is in this report,” said Kate Michelman, former President of NARAL Pro-Choice America and long-time Pennsylvania resident who served as a consultant to this project.

Through the Lens of Equality examines the health impact of sexual and intimate partner violence, caregiving responsibilities, poverty, and bias in the workplace, school, and health care.  The report delves into the politicization of women’s reproductive health care and shows how women are harmed by limited access to abortion, contraception, and maternity care.  It repeatedly points to the importance of implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) to expand access to better health care for women, while acknowledging the ACA’s serious gaps, including not mandating abortion coverage.

“This is not a publication about diseases, but instead an exposition of how biased environments in which women live, work, study, and receive health services are infected with outdated notions about women’s role in society which in turn have negative health consequences for them,” said Amal Bass, staff attorney at the Women’s Law Project.

The publication also provides a series of recommendations tailored to both overcoming sex bias and improving women’s health.  “Numerous targeted interventions well beyond improving access to insurance through the ACA — are necessary to cure institutional and individual prejudices about women,” said Terry Fromson, Managing Attorney of the WLP.  “Failure to do so will result in significant inequitable and avoidable health problems for women,” she added.

Through the Lens of Equality acknowledges the impressive strides that have been made in women’s rights over the past fifty years, but shows that past victories are not enough.  “Looking to the future requires insistence on equal treatment, equal access, and equal opportunity to achieve not just healthy women, but a healthy society,” said Susan Frietsche, Senior Staff Attorney

The Women’s Law Project is a legal advocacy organization based in Pennsylvania.  Founded   in 1974, its mission is to create a more just and equitable society by advancing the rights and status of all women throughout their lives.  The Law Project engages in high impact litigation, public policy advocacy and community education.   Through the Lens of Equality is available at http://www.womenslawproject.org/NewPages/wkTLE_Base.html.

 

Decarcerate PA: Fighting the School-to-Prison-to-Exploited-Labor Pipeline

On October 12^th, Decarcerate PA led a rally against the expansion of prisons in Montgomery County.  Protesters marched from the Occupy Philadelphia encampment to the Philadelphia offices of Hill International, which was recently contracted to construct new prisons in Montgomery County.

According to the Decarcerate Pennsylvania website:

The Graterfordexpansion will double the current size of the prison at a projected cost of $400 million. In addition to adding more beds, the proposed new prison will include a new 100 bed death row and a unit for women prisoners.  The two new Graterford prisons are part of a $685 million plan to expand prisons across the state.

In 2011, the Center for Research on Globalization reported that the 1.8 million people imprisoned in the United States represented “the highest per capita incarceration rate in the history of the world” – and those numbers haven’t gotten any smaller.  The United States, home to only five percent of the world’s population, houses twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. Pennsylvania alone spends close to $2M per year – roughly 7% of the yearly state budget – on prisons – yet our elected officials insist that we just don’t have the money to fund public schools.

In its factsheet on the well-documented phenomenon of the school-to-prison pipeline, the ACLU writes:

For most students, the pipeline begins with inadequate resources in public schools. Overcrowded classrooms, a lack of qualified teachers, and insufficient funding for “extras” such as counselors, special education services, and even textbooks, lock students into second-rate educational environments. This failure to meet educational needs increases disengagement and dropouts, increasing the risk of later court­involvement.

If it’s that obvious, then why don’t we simply, as Decarcerate PA sloganizes, “Fund Schools Not Prisons”?  Why do we continue to prioritize the imprisonment and correction of overwhelmingly nonviolent drug offenders over the education of our children? 

At first glance, this policy doesn’t seem to be in anybody’s interest. But upon closer inspection, the rapid expansion of prisons does benefit some.

For instance, it can benefit politicians to have prisons in their jurisdictions. Prisoners are counted as being registered in the district where the prison is located, which inflates the official population of those districts, giving some rural areas more districts, and thus more votes and more power; this is known as prison-based gerrymandering. 

Primarily, though, the fast-growing prison system benefits corporations, who use the incarcerated as a source of cheap labor.

The 1.8 million people we’re paying to incarcerate? They are being exploited (often forced or otherwise coerced) to perform tasks for corporate profit including wrapping software for Microsoft, making lingerie for Victoria’s Secret and taking airline reservations over the phone during flight attendants’ strikes.  Inmates in Louisiana debone chickens for four cents an hour. In Oregon, they make electronic menu boards for McDonalds. In many cases, these inmates are threatened with solitary confinement if they refuse to work for corporate gain.  This partnership between prisons and private industry allows corporations to pay workers less than two dollars an hour, without having to outsource.

The rapid growth of the United States prison population benefits the corporations that can save money and increase their profit margins by “insourcing,” so to speak, low-paying manufacture jobs to inmates who don’t present such inconveniences as needing health insurance or the possibility of missing work for a family emergency. The same system harms not only the incarcerated individuals and their families and communities, but the non-incarcerated, low-skilled workers who need those jobs. It also robs the government of the tax revenue that would be generated if the unemployed workers whose jobs were given to prisoners – and the prisoners themselves, most of whom are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses – were able to work for a living wage and pay income taxes. By spending money on prisons instead of schools and infrastructure, the United States government is investing its resources in an area that promises little to no return, at the expense of creating jobs for workers who would pay back those costs in tax revenue.

Undergraduate Women Face Discrimination, Fewer Leadership Opportunities

In March 2011, the Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership at Princeton University found  that “there are differences—subtle but real—between the ways most Princeton female undergraduates and most male undergraduates approach their college years, and in the ways they navigate Princeton when they arrive.” The Committee also saw that their findings seem to be indicative of broader trends at undergraduate universities—“Through the work of our subcommittee on comparative data, we learned that many of the patterns we observed at Princeton are common on other campuses.”

One important difference that the Committee found was that women are less likely to run for elected positions for a variety of reasons. Some undergraduates who were interviewed said that they chose not to run for a traditional elected position because they doubted how much change they could affect in that position whereas some were just intimidated by the public visibility that is involved in a campaign for elective office. However, there were also “women who do consider running for visible campus posts, especially a presidency [but don’t run since they] get the message from peers that such posts are more appropriately sought by men.”

Sexism that prevents women from running for leadership positions on college campuses is not just external. The Committee found that internalized sexism also plays a role. “Female undergraduates may say that they do not have the skills or experience to run for a highly visible post, that others (usually men) are better qualified. Even women who are regarded as strong leaders by their peers and faculty and staff members may not see themselves in such a light.” For this reason, women are more likely to need encouragement in order to reach their potential. Whereas “men are more likely to consider themselves plausible candidates for office or prizes and step forward without special encouragement; women often report that such encouragement led them to take the steps that produced significant achievements.”

Of course, gender discrimination does not affect undergraduate women only around issues of leadership. While “male undergraduates may also feel pressures to conform to a certain set of campus norms… the pressures seem to be especially marked for women.” Undergraduate women at Princeton “sometimes feel that they are expected to measure up to an impossible standard. They are supposed to be smart, involved in many different activities (as are men), and also ‘pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly,’ as one undergraduate reported.”

You can read the entire report here. You can stay updated on various efforts to make campuses a better environment for women at the Feministing Campus page.

Report: Single-Sex Education is Ineffective

A new report by the Board of the American Council of Coeducational Schooling (ACCES), The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling, recently published in Science magazine  reveals (pdf)  that “placing children in single-sex learning environments is ineffective, misguided and may actually have harmful effects on children.” This data comes at a time when the number of single-sex classrooms in the U.S. is growing.  There were only two single-sex public schools in the 1990s but today there are more than 500 public schools that either offer single-sex classes or that are entirely single-sex.

The popularity of single-sex schooling has grown partially because of misinformation spread by proponents of single sex public schooling that boys and girls should be taught separately because of differences in their brains.  One of their proponents, Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, relying on research on rats, claims that boys need to be stressed in order to learn and therefore they must must be taught in cold classrooms in aggressive, confrontational styles.  Girls, according to Sax, require quiet warm classrooms, where they can take off their shoes and cuddle in a blanket brought from home.

Dr. Diane F. Halpern, the lead author of the report and past president of the American Psychological Association who holds a chair in psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California, said in an interview with the New York Times that Sax’s logic is faulty. She stated,

“A loud, cold classroom where you toss balls around, like Dr. Sax thinks boys should have, might be great for some boys, and for some girls, but for some boys, it would be living hell”…She said that while girls are better readers and get better grades, and boys are more likely to have reading disabilities, that does not mean that educators should use the group average to design different classrooms. “It’s simply not true that boys and girls learn differently…”

Indeed, the report argues that not only is single-sex schooling ineffective at improving educational outcomes, but it is actually harmful. The report states that “sex-segregated education is deeply misguided and often justified by weak, cherry-picked or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence.” It argues that “single- sex education reduces opportunities for boys and girls to interact together, which serves to reinforce negative gender stereotyping.”

The report “calls on the Education Department to rescind its 2006 regulations weakening the Title IX prohibition against sex discrimination in education.” These regulations allow single-sex classrooms provided they are voluntary, the school believes single-sex education will provide a better education for students, and that “students have a substantially equal coeducational option.” 

The Women’s Law Project has fought against discrimination in education. To learn about our work to prevent single-sex classrooms, click here.

What We’re Reading: Title IX

Title IX, a law which requires gender equity for boys and girls in every educational program that receives federal funding passed 39 years ago. However its promise has not been completely  fulfilled, even four decades later.  Here are some of the stories we have been reading recently which got us thinking about how far we have come in achieving equality in education and how far we still have to go.

• Parents of competitive cheerleaders at Lugoff-Elgin High School in Camden, South Carolina, are requesting a formal investigation of Title IX compliance after they say school administrators refused to pay for new uniforms.
• Some universities (including Duke, Wake Forest, and Appalachian State) listed men who assist in practices of women’s teams as members of the teams in a federal study. It is probably not the case that any of these schools did this to better fulfill Title IX requirements since, according to the article, “counting the men as part of the women’s team didn’t significantly change any of the three schools’ Title IX numbers.” However, Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a law professor at Florida Coastal and the senior director of advocacy at the Women’s Sports Foundation says that another school may use this loophole to give “‘the appearance of an untrained eye that the school would not have to add another women’s team (to be in compliance) with Title IX.’”
• Kristine Newhall addresses critiques of Title IX which argue that it creates reverse discrimination: “It seems difficult to argue that Title IX is creating reverse discrimination when men have always had and continue to have more opportunities.”
• The University of Montana, “in danger of falling out of compliance with Title IX,” started a softball program.
• Sue Estler, an Associate Professor Emirita of higher education at the University of Maine who served 11 years as the Director of Equal Opportunity and Title Coordinator reflects  on the history of Title IX and the continuing struggle to ensure that schools are in compliance with it.
• A federal appeals court will hear a case alleging that Indiana schools discriminated against girls’ basketball teams by scheduling girls’ games for weeknights and boys’ games for Friday and Saturday nights.

To find out about the Women’s Law Project’s Title IX-related advocacy, click here. Image via.

Women in Academia

Bestcollegesonline.com recently published a list of “15 Incredibly Inspiring Women in Academia.” The list includes such notable women as Marie Curie, Maya Angelou, and Judith Butler. Included in the list are brief biographical notes about the women’s respective accomplishments and the hurdles each had to overcome to achieve success in academia. Hopefully we have moved past the days when talented female mathematicians like Sophie Germain had to take on the identity of a male university student in order to gain a higher education. However, women have yet to earn equality in academia.

A 2011 study (PDF) published by Catalyst, “the leading nonprofit membership organization expanding opportunities for women and business” reveals some upsetting gender inequalities in academia. During the time in which the study took place, “women had fewer and lower percentages of tenure positions than men at doctoral, masters, and bachelor’s institutions. Women [also] occupied more non-tenure track positions than tenure track positions, and men overwhelmingly comprised  the majority of tenured faculty.” Indeed, the study found that only 24% of full professors were women.

The lack of women in academia seems inconsistent with the number of women in higher education. Indeed, “women continue to earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees, and are projected to earn in the majority of master’s [degrees].”Though the number of women faculty members doubled (PDF) from 1984 to 2008 and a lower percentage of men start out on the tenure track than women, Danielle L. Auriemma and Tovah P. Klein of Barnard College  found that “a much higher percentage of [men], compared to women, hold tenure, and far fewer [men] are on the non-tenure-track.”

An explanation for the lack of women in various career fields that “has been pushed by media” is that women “freely choose not to work after becoming mothers.” However, Auriemma and Klein show that statistics do not prove this claim to be true. Indeed, “the majority of educated women with young children [are] in the work force. In 2007, over 70% of women with children worked outside the home (Halpern, 2008). Statistics are similar for highly educated women in their thirties where 2/3 of those with a young child work outside the home (Boushey, 2005).”

Though the question of where the women in academia go and why does not have a definitive answer, many have pointed to an insufficient support system for mothers in academia as one culprit.  Female faculty members reported having to turn down speaking engagements and generally traveling less for work in order to accommodate their children. Female faculty members also reported having less time to have “uninterrupted, concentrated time- to think, to create new ideas,” necessary for an academic.

Male faculty members do not share the burdens of parenthood evenly with their female counterparts. An opinion piece by Sara Ballard and Gurtina Besla for The Harvard Crimson shows that this trend starts when future professors are in graduate school.

A 2008 GSAS study of graduate student parents found that graduate student mothers bore the primary responsibilities for childcare in the months after the birth of a child: more than half (55 percent) of the spouses of Harvard graduate mothers stayed home for four weeks or less, while only two percent of the spouses of Harvard graduate fathers stayed home for four weeks or less. The burden of childcare is undeniably borne more heavily by the women graduate students. This statistic is reflected in the findings of the UCBerkeleystudy that determined that tenured women professors in science are three times more likely to be single without children than their male counterparts (25 percent versus nine percent).

In order to retain talented female scholars in academia in light of the disproportionate demands of parenthood on women, the American Federation of Teachers’  Higher Education Department suggested (PDF) that faculty unions make gender diversity a bigger priority. Auriemma and Klein also suggest more

Institutional attention to providing, publicizing, and encouraging the use of policies that help faculty deal with professional and personal responsibilities [which] will both enhance the quality of the environment, making it more attractive to academic women, and help individual scholars fulfill professional and personal duties.

Auriemma and Klein also suggest a re-envisioning of the tenure-track model. They ask “what would it mean to envision a career over a longer time span, not over a 7 year span? Rather than a linear progression, peaks and valleys over time would be expected. What does it mean to invest up front and allow a woman to become a mother, then to see her productivity soar at a later time?”

To make sure young mothers may pursue a professorship, Ballard and Besla recommend childcare assistance programs be made available for graduate students as well as faculty.

Women, now the majority of bachelor’s degree earners, are still underrepresented in academia, particularly in tenured positions. In the effort to figure out the reasons for this disparity and to make the playing field of academia an even one for both genders we may look to the 15 incredible women that bestcollegesonline.com provides for us as inspiration.  These women are testaments to how important it is to make sure the next great mathematician or Poet Laureate has her talent realized.

(Photo from hvaldez1)

Sexual Misconduct at Yale Highlights Negligence for Women’s Protection

The New York Times recently published an article on sexual misconduct at Yale. The article speaks on the growing concern for the amount of sexual misconduct on the campus.

Suddenly, however, these episodes have the campus in a state of high alert. Yale acknowledged last week that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was investigating a complaint filed by 16 students and recent graduates, accusing the university of violating Title IX, the federal gender-equality law, by failing to eliminate a hostile sexual environment on campus. The complaint alleges a range of acts against women, from taunts to assaults, over seven years.

Various questions have been raised about Yale’s response to the activity occurring on their campus. Many have criticized them for not being vigilant enough when it came to disciplining students, and investigating crimes. There is this notion that the university is more willing to protect their free speech and fraternity culture than their female population, which constitutes slightly more than half of the student body.

Administrators said they sympathized with those who were unhappy with the disciplinary process. Punishing students in public episodes like the chanting is complicated by a hallowed tradition of free speech on campus, as well as by fraternities’ independence from the university and by confidentiality requirements that prevent Yale from naming students it disciplines.

We can only hope Yale becomes more alert to problems occurring on their campus. Their failure to acknowledge and investigate incidents is extremely troubling, and only promotes intolerance and fear on the campus. There is no excuse for the negligence displayed by the university, and we applaud the 16 women who have stood up and demanded accountability on their campus.