All posts tagged: gender

A Catholic solution to gender bias in AI

A Catholic solution to gender bias in AI

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — The widespread analyses of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” overlook one thing: Artificial intelligence is inherently male.  Most people think of AI as a tool to summarize information through what are called large language models. The problem: LLMs are trained by men, and most of the data and information available has been created by men. Most of the programmers teaching AI to “think” are men. So, AI decision-making and prediction behaviors are essentially male. No wonder the pope has called for “disarmament” of AI. Men go to war. The world is a mess. Can AI help? Maybe yes. Maybe no. These are Pope Leo’s answers in “Magnifica Humanitas,” which he released on Monday (May 25) along with three cardinals, two female professors and Christopher Olah, co-founder of the AI giant Anthropic. Olah specializes in reverse engineering neural networks at Anthropic. That means he looks inside the machine, as it were, trying to understand how it learns, how it “thinks,” how it makes decisions. But almost everything he studies comes from the male …

The GOP’s Attacks on James Talarico Are Straight Out of the Incel Handbook

The GOP’s Attacks on James Talarico Are Straight Out of the Incel Handbook

Published by skeptic

On Tuesday, with Donald Trump’s endorsement and the backing of the MAGA faithful, scandal-ridden Texas attorney general Ken Paxton defeated incumbent US senator John Cornyn in a runoff primary to claim the Republican nomination for that seat. He then quickly set about painting his general-election opponent, Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, as insufficiently masculine. “My opponent is the most extreme radical that Democrats have ever nominated,” Paxton said in his victory speech. “He’s even running a vegan campaign, whatever that is. He goes by a few names that you may all have heard of. Some people know him as Tofu Talarico. Some people call him Six-Gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako. And others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.” The spattering of derogatory nicknames was a not entirely successful Trumpian flourish. (The Talarico campaign, already a fundraising juggernaut, started selling “I’m a Talafreako” T-shirts right away). But Paxton’s attacks also seemed to emanate from the manosphere and incel culture, overlapping internet communities obsessed with their own unscientific theories …

Sisyphus in the Kitchen: The Tradwife Brand and the Closed Menu of Women’s Lives

Sisyphus in the Kitchen: The Tradwife Brand and the Closed Menu of Women’s Lives

Published by Jenni Sidey

The slogan: “Make America Great Again” works by inviting us to long for a past that was ordered, stable, and allegedly better than the present, without ever specifying for whom it was great or what made it so. When that nostalgia is cashed out in concrete proposals about women’s lives, a particular picture emerges in which women appear primarily as wives, mothers, and helpmates whose worth is exhausted by domestic and reproductive labor. This picture, I argue, is hostile to women in that it curtails, on an arbitrary basis, those activities women have available to them to make meaning in their lives. The central claim is that by reviving and seeking to mandate traditional gender roles, these movements constrict the range of life projects women can pursue, relegating women to a more extreme Sisyphean existence than they would otherwise experience. The harm is not that some households choose to organize themselves around these roles, but that the choice to do otherwise is increasingly pushed out of reach. The greater danger lies in enforcing traditional roles …

‘Hello ladies and sons of ladies’: women are using ‘microfeminisms’ to flip the gender script | Women

‘Hello ladies and sons of ladies’: women are using ‘microfeminisms’ to flip the gender script | Women

Published by Sam Flores

When Tori Dunlap writes a letter or email to a heterosexual couple, she puts the woman’s name first in the greeting. When her good friend got married, Dunlap waited until the name-change documents were officially signed to update her surname in her phone contact. These tiny rebellions are not activism. They are “microfeminisms”, or what Dunlap, 31, describes as “little actions for women’s equality, as opposed to going to a protest or donating to a cause you believe in”. Dunlap, a Seattle-based author and podcast host who focuses on promoting women’s financial literacy, posted on TikTok last year asking her 2.4 million followers: “Tell me your most unhinged way that you practice microfeminism.” The comments section filled with niche – and not entirely serious – answers, such as starting every work presentation by saying “hello ladies and sons of ladies” and “immediately assuming men are talking about women’s sports instead of men’s”. Women on TikTok have revived the trend in recent weeks, sharing their own microfeminisms. “I call the spiders MOMMY long legs,” one user …

Trump’s DOJ escalates its gender affirming care attack on minors

Trump’s DOJ escalates its gender affirming care attack on minors

Published by Sam Flores

As of last week, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has begun issuing criminal subpoenas seeking information on gender-affirming care administered to minors. This escalation, critics argue, is the latest step in a larger effort to push transgender Americans further out of public life. “They are asking for identifiable patient records, which should scare every American, whether they’re trans or not,” Tyler Hack, the founder and executive director of Christopher Street Project, a PAC boosting candidates committed to protecting trans rights, told Salon. “Everyone relies on patient privacy in the relationship between them and their provider, and that’s something the Trump administration wants to throw out the window because they want to look through our medical records and decide what they like and don’t like.” Last week, NYU Langone Health informed its patients that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas had issued criminal subpoenas to multiple medical institutions seeking information on providers and every minor to whom it had administered gender-affirming care in recent years. So far NYU Langone Health is …

A Judge Is Protecting Youth Gender Care in Kansas While a Settlement in Texas Attacks It

A Judge Is Protecting Youth Gender Care in Kansas While a Settlement in Texas Attacks It

Published by Sam Flores

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas judge on Friday protected access to gender-affirming care for transgender minors as the nation’s largest children’s hospital moved to restrict such care in Texas, buckling under pressure from the Trump administration. Texas Children’s Hospital, based in Houston, said in a statement that it had agreed to a legal settlement “to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation.” The hospital, which serves more than 1 million patients a year, stopped providing hormone treatments for transgender children and teens in 2022, a year before the state banned such care, but still faced a yearslong investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office. Paxton and the Trump administration said the hospital would pay Texas $10 million and would be required to open what he called a “detransition clinic” to “reverse the damage” from gender-affirming care, which he’s described as child abuse. Most major medical groups say access to gender-affirming care as important for people with gender dysphoria. Transgender teens, parents and providers have described it …

After she complained of gender bias, a PCA church fired her. A judge ruled it retaliation.

After she complained of gender bias, a PCA church fired her. A judge ruled it retaliation.

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — A Chicago-area church led by bestselling author and pastor Dane Ortlund must pay $93,000 in back wages and damages to a former staffer after a judge ruled the church retaliated against her. Administrative Judge Azeema Akram of the Illinois Human Rights Commission ruled last week that Naperville Presbyterian Church’s firing of Emily Hyland in 2021, after she claimed she had been mistreated because of her gender, qualified as retaliation and violated Illinois law. “Complainant successfully proved retaliation by a preponderance of the evidence, as she was able to show that she engaged in a protected activity when she complained about sex-based discrimination, that Respondent knew about it, and that there was a causal nexus between her complaints and her subsequent termination,” Akram wrote in her decision. Akram also ruled that Hyland failed to prove the church had discriminated against her. Church officials argued that Hyland was fired for poor job performance and denied any retaliation. Emily Hyland. (Courtesy photo) The ruling came just over five years after Hyland was terminated from her role …

The gender friendship gap is driven primarily by white men, not a universal difference across groups

The gender friendship gap is driven primarily by white men, not a universal difference across groups

Published by José Betancourt

For years, researchers have claimed that men’s friendships are shallower and less emotionally supportive than women’s, a pattern called the “gender friendship gap.” But new research challenges how universal that really is. Published in Sex Roles, the study finds that the gap is largely driven by white men specifically, not men as a whole. Much of the work on the gender friendship gap has relied on predominantly white, middle-class samples, which raises an important question: do these patterns actually apply across different racial and socioeconomic groups? Researcher Emily C. Fox revisited this assumption by taking an intersectional approach, examining how gender and ethnoracial identity jointly shape friendship experiences. Drawing on prior research suggesting that social context, marginalization, and cultural norms influence how friendships are formed and maintained, the author questioned whether the “gap” reflects a universal gender difference or whether it is concentrated within specific groups. The study used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort, a large, nationally representative U.S. sample tracked over time. Fox focused on respondents who, in 2002, …

Seeing Ourselves Through Others: A Feminized and Uncultivated Form of Self-Consciousness?

Seeing Ourselves Through Others: A Feminized and Uncultivated Form of Self-Consciousness?

Published by Jenni Sidey

A major achievement of feminist, antiracist, and other critical philosophies has been to disclose that seemingly neutral philosophical concepts are in fact (at least in part) reconstructions of specifically able-bodied, bourgeois, cis, masculine, White, or otherwise privileged perspectives on the world. Concepts that have undergone such scrutiny are, for example, freedom, individuality, reason, or contract. Here, I focus on self-consciousness, a central philosophical concept especially in German Idealism. For many years, I have been interested in one specific figure of this tradition, namely Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Recently, Lucy O’Brien and Talia Bettcher have contributed to revealing the limited perspective on the world articulated in common concepts of self-consciousness. To my knowledge, they have not read each other’s works. Both, however, express similar thoughts which deserve further attention and might enrich each other. Self-consciousness is consciousness of the self. The self, however, has different parts or dimensions, so one may distinguish different kinds of self-consciousness. In Fichte (and others), typically, the distinction between theoretical and practical self-consciousness is essential. In practical self-consciousness, I am conscious of …

FCC floats new ratings for kids’ shows with ‘gender identity themes’

FCC floats new ratings for kids’ shows with ‘gender identity themes’

Published by skeptic

The Federal Communications Commission is using the presence of “controversial gender identity issues” in children’s television programming as a pretense for questioning how TV ratings are developed and enforced, according to a notice published Wednesday by the federal agency. The notice generally assesses TV ratings, but specifically points out that these industry guidelines have rated shows featuring “transgender and gender non-binary programming” as appropriate for children. It argues that parents aren’t provided this information, “thereby undermining the ability of parents to make informed choices for their families.” In the document, the FCC poses a series of open-ended questions about TV ratings development, including whether the board responsible for the guidelines is “sufficiently balanced” with viewpoints outside of the entertainment industry and if faith-based organizations should be represented in the body. “What more could the board do to include family-oriented perspectives — which are not well represented in the media industry — in its ratings process?” the notice asks. SEE ALSO: What’s new to streaming this week? (April 24, 2026) FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced the …