Melinda Gates' $1 Billion To Advance American Women | Trump Voters Want Women at Home

Philanthropist Melinda Gates is not sleeping well in Trumplandia. After a decade of watching the erosion of women’s rights and women’s progress in America, Gates has decided to do a very public reality check on the state of American women.

Reality is that 50 years after the second wave of the women’s movement ignited, only one CEO on the list of people running Fortune 500 companies is a woman of color. Gates cites the sobering fact that in 2018, there were more men names James running Fortune 500 companies than women.

Her action plan involves $1 billion spent towards expanding women’s power and influence in America. “There is no reason to believe this moment will last forever,” Gates, founder of investment and incubation company Pivotal Ventures, wrote in a Time.com opinion piece about the women’s marches, #MeToo movement, and the political activism and elections to office for American women.

“Too many people - women and men - have worked too hard to get us this far,” she wrote. “There are too many possible solutions we haven’t tried yet.”

Goals include dismantling barriers to women’s job advancement such as care-giving obligations and sexual harassment and fast-tracking women in influential job sectors such as technology, media and public office. Gates doesn’t

I, too, lie awake at night worrying about this possibility -- and have for a decade. The arrival of the Republican Tea Party in 2010 signaled an awesome erosion of women’s rights that have exploded since Trump became president.

One night I actually had a terrifying nightmare related to women’s access to contraception in America, and this was several years before the dystopian Handmaid Tale became a Hulu hit.

There is no doubt that Republicans are determined to take US women back to the 50s, eliminate all child care support, even public education in an effort to get American women having babies and even home schooling them with the Biblical good book.

I worry that America is increasingly becoming an Arab country -- and I don't mean too many Muslims. I mean too many Republicans wanting a theocracy where a Christian God runs the country, just as Allah and his men culturally and politically run the Muslim countries. The vast majority (over 70% of Trump's women voters and 58% of men) support this vision for America, as evidenced by extensive research done on Trump voters by Baylor Christian University in Waco, Texas. ~ Anne

THE SACRED VALUES OF “TRUMPISM”

Core Values

Researchers looked at how religious values, behaviors and beliefs predicted political support for Trump, finding that the majority of those who voted for him tend to:

• Say they are “very religious”

• Are members of white Evangelical Protestant churches

• View the United States as a Christian nation

• Believe in an authoritative God who is actively engaged in world affairs

• See Muslims as threats to America

• Value gender traditionalism, feeling that men are better suited for politics and should earn more than women; women should provide primary child care; and working women are deficient as mothers

• Oppose lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights (such as legal marriage)

Empowering Women Is Key To Planned Population Growth in Africa, Educated Citizens, Good Health and Economic Development

Empowering Women Is Key To Planned Population Growth in Africa, Educated Citizens, Good Health and Economic Development

By Alex Ezeh, Dornsife Professor of Global Health, Drexel University

I think about the future of my continent in terms of three questions: Are Africans healthy? Do they have access to a good education? And do they have opportunities to apply their skills?

Millions more Africans have been able to answer yes to these questions in recent years. But there’s an elephant in the room. One of the keys to keeping this progress going is slowing down the rapid rates of population growth in parts of the continent. But population issues are so difficult to talk about that the development community has been ignoring them for years.

Population growth is a controversial topic because, in the not-too-distant past, some countries tried to control population growth with abusive, coercive policies, including forced sterilization. Now, human rights are again at the centre of the discussion about family planning, where they belong. But as part of repairing the wounds created by this history, population was removed from the development vocabulary altogether.

For the sake of Africa’s future, we should bring it back. Based on current trends, Africa as a whole is projected to double in size by 2050. Between 2050 and 2100, according to the United Nations, it could almost double again. In that case, the continent would have to quadruple its efforts just to maintain the current level of investment in health and education, which is too low already.

But if the rate of population growth slows down there will be more resources to invest in each African’s health, education, and opportunity – in other words, in a good life.