July 22, 2015

Single women unlawfully excluded from IVF treatment

Filed under: Health,Science by Orangemaster @ 9:58 am

A survey conducted by women’s magazine ‘Opzij’ showed that single women are refused IVF treatment at 19 out of the 39 Dutch hospitals they researched, indicating discrimination. They are often told to go somewhere else with better facilities like a sperm bank or with counselling to avoid telling them flat out they won’t treat single women. The hospitals’ moral view is often that ‘a child should have two parents’, but it is illegal to refuse someone based on their single ‘lifestyle’. On the other hand, a history of abuse or addiction is a good reason to refuse treatment to someone.

Frank Broekmans of the Dutch association of gynaecologists and obstetrician says hospitals that refuse to perform IVF are not acting unlawfully because enough hospitals can cater to single women and it’s not necessary medical attention. He also believes a child is not well-served by having only one parent, but again, that’s discrimination even if it is a widely-held belief.

Bart Fauser of the UMC Utrecht hospital, the same hospital where Broekmans works and the most friendly towards single women looking for IVF treatment, says that there is no scientific proof that children of a single parent have a worse time of it. Once Fauser tried to screen a couple before an IVF treatment and he was heavily criticised, leading him to believe that couples always seem to have the right to decide what’s best for them, but not single women.

All I know is that Belgium has more IVF clinics, and like for many procedures including childbirth (if I can continue to believe the people around me), Dutch residents cross the border to get treated without the hassles they experience in the Netherlands.

(Links: www.volkskrant.nl, www.opzij.nl)

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May 11, 2015

Dutch Marine Corps slow accepting women on submarines

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:22 am

Submarine-helm

A quick search shows that the UK started allowing women on submarines in 2013, and the US will be up to speed in 2016. The UK used to quote the build-up of carbon dioxide to exclude women, while the US was mainly concerned about women’s privacy. These reasons faded once new submarines were built and now the Netherlands wants to finally get women on board submarines as well — in 2025.

Why is the Netherlands so slow? The privacy issue as it relates to closed quarters and showers is still an issue because the Netherlands Marine Corps does not allow women to become marines. This also means that adapting submarines for female personnel has never been a priority. According to the link below on Dutch ships, it’s not possible to move alongside another person on a submarine without touching each other, and the Dutch marines have no interest in a women’s only submarine.

The first countries in the world to allow women on submarines were Norway (1985), Denmark (1988), Sweden (1989), Australia (1998), Canada and Spain (2000), which makes the Netherlands about a slow as a row boat without oars on the matter.

(Links: www.rtvnh.nl, marineschepen.nl, Photo of Submarine helm by Geert Orye, some rights reserved)

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March 25, 2015

Are women afraid to use the self-scanner?

Filed under: Food & Drink,General,Technology by Orangemaster @ 1:26 pm

Rosie

It is a tendentious question, but what on earth is Rosie the Riveter being used to encourage women folk, who are the main food shoppers, that they too have enough brains to use the relatively new self-scanners at the supermarket? It says ‘We scan ourselves!’. If they had a picture of a tough guy saying ‘I can use a scanner, too!’ it would be condescending. The scanners also work in other languages, so the insult isn’t lost on the non-Dutch crowd.

Hang on: the message with a woman is condescending towards women! Retro is cute, but not like this. Rosie deserves a hell of a lot better.

This lame message is quite typical of corporate Dutch passive-agressiveness: use the fokkin scanners ladies, as we’d rather have our cheap students (mostly female by the way) lose their jobs to a self-scanner over time. Yes, it’s mainly boys that stock shelves because, well, boys. I bet Rosie could kick all of their asses.

As a representative of women folk, I don’t always use the scanner because when I buy alcohol, an employee needs to come over, verify my age and swipe their magic card through the scanner so I can get on with it.

If you don’t agree that the poster is insulting to women, fine. But you should agree that it’s fokkin unoriginal.

(Photo: Mariëlle Verbeek)

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June 23, 2014

Dutch newspaper calls all new moms MILF

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:55 pm

A Dutch newspaper has seemingly let one of their young male interns equate new mothers with their ‘bangability’ when calling them MILF in an article on the statistics of new mums going back to work after having had their first child. The title of the article is ‘New MILFs are working more’.

Luckily, Dutch women and men alike took this pathetic attempt at journalism in stride, but everyone was surprised to say the least. Many people claimed that not all mothers are MILF, and even if someone thinks they are, that’s some pretty vulgar language for a mediocre free ‘dead tree publication’. This also means that the newspaper thinks it’s OK to refer to mothers as MILF, which is 50 freaking shades of wrong.

It is remotely possible that what many imagine to be an idiot of an intern doesn’t even know what MILF means, which is almost up there with calling American performer Rihanna a n*****bitch, saying it was meant as a compliment. However, there are editors at a newspaper and obviously they think this is fine.

Are men and women as parents equal in the Netherlands? Not by a long shot.

UPDATE: According to real journalists on FB, the newspaper has claimed that “MILF is not a derogatory term”. I’m claiming ‘shitty newspaper’ and ‘shit intern’ are nicknames then.

(Links: m.spitsnieuws.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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June 4, 2014

Women dressing up as men to ask for a pay raise

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:36 pm

“Are you a woman? Then you deserve € 300,000 more”, says Women INC in collaboration with Loonwijzer, a site that helps people calculate what they should be making. Loonwijzer claims that a woman could make on average € 300,000 more — I’m assuming in their lifetime.

The YouTube film below (in Dutch) starts off with the statement, ‘Where is my € 300,000?’. The gist of the video is, as one of the women says at the beginning, “enough is enough, I’m asking for a raise!”. The rest is quite self-explanatory and looks like a Smack the Pony sketch, and in fact, one of the women, Margôt Ros, is well-know from a comedy show called ‘Toren C’ (Tower C), which is a bit of a Dutch equivalent. Basically, if women want a raise, they need a beard and a fake penis to get one, which is funny, but also quite sad. Employers and politicians are the ones being lobbied to close the gap between the earnings of men and women, something nobody has ever solved in the Western world. Of course, the reason why women are paid less come down to much more than a costume change.

Just remember that the Netherlands ranks in bottom 10 performing countries for women in business and Some 60% of women cannot earn their own keep.

(Link: www.deondernemer.nl, Illustration: public domain version of the symbol of feminism, via Wikimedia Commons)

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May 12, 2014

Bearded women calendar from 1997

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 1:18 pm

women-with-beards-jetty-verhoeff

Women with Beards (note: occasional nudity) was an art project that ran from 1997 to 1998 in which every month a photo and biography of a bearded ‘babe’ was added to a website. Ine Poppe and Jetty Verhoeff ran the project and the beards were applied by make-up artist Ellen Wenniger.

The artists write: “In former days women with beards were exposed as an aberration at fairs. In the 21st century female facial hair will be the ultimate of sexual seductiveness.” And elsewhere they add: “Several articles have by now appeared about our project: they raise questions about our playing with gender. We don’t have a cut-and-dried answer to these: we just want to amuse and entertain. Like Jetty said to a Dutch journalist: ‘In my imagination our calendar is pinned to the wall with scotch tape in a garage in Australia.'”

In 2008 the project was part of the Kiki on Steroids! exhibit (again, NSFW) which explored “the world of transgenderism and self-representation on the Internet”. In this exhibit photos of “hairy babes of the month” were displayed almost life sized over toilets and urinals.

(Illustration: cropped screenshot of the Women with Beards website)

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March 12, 2014

Nothing’s changed in Dutch women’s position at the bottom

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:25 am

The title of the Dutch Daily News article says it all: ‘The Netherlands ranks in bottom 10 performing countries for women in business’. “The Netherlands cites just 10 percent of senior roles occupied by women, a minute decrease from the previous year (11 percent).” This says nothing about the preponderance of Dutch women running small businesses, because that’s actually good news.

Every year around International Women’s Day (8 March) the Dutch government says it wants more women in top positions, but at the same time, its policies continue to perpetrate an insidious tradition of having new moms stay at home sometimes for years and then maybe pick up some part-time work. What’s more, lots of women without children have part-time jobs because they have a man paying the real bills, continuing a pattern that has outlived its use. However, it is true that part-time work is much more protected than in other countries and that you can still earn some decent money, albeit not enough to have the luxuries that many women enjoy as paid by their man’s full-time job.

While part-time work in other Western countries is associated with students and pensioners, in the Netherlands it is slowly turning into a synonym for unambitious Dutch women by the media. Personally, this hurts because I can think of dozens of women that work like crazy and don’t fit this bill, even remotely. And I say Dutch because apparently many immigrants don’t have options and work their lesser paid asses off, male of female, kids or no kids. We never hear them talking about having a choice, either, that’s for the more privileged group to defend.

The government blames big business, big business blames women having children (as if men weren’t part of the process), women with children blame childcare and childcare blames the government.

What I’ve learnt over the years is that many women don’t want to work more hours, but that’s easy to do when the rest of the money comes in as long as you keep your relationship intact. Part-time work for women is seen as normal, whereas elsewhere in Europe it’s seen as shortchanging someone out of a real job. However, part-time work remains career killer number one, that’s why men work full-time and remain chairmen of the board, not women.

In 2014, as far as having women in high places, The Netherlands is still the ‘unemancipated 1950s housewife’ of Western Europe.

2013: Lack of women in top management roles in the Netherlands

2012: Dutch women are unequal, change is slow and ‘Some 60% of women cannot earn their own keep’

2010: Women with partners prefer part-time jobs

2009: Women have low impact on Dutch work force

(Link: www.dutchdailynews.com, Photo of Birthday cake by C J Sorg, some rights reserved)

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January 31, 2014

Amsterdam’s new street names will be named after women

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 11:05 am

Local TV station AT5 tells us that only 7% of street names in Amsterdam are named after women, and that the mayor has promised to change that in the future. Of course, Amsterdam’s streets are named after a whole bunch of other things like bridges and canals, but we do live in 2014 and it wouldn’t kill the city to make this kind of upgrade.

A Master’s thesis by Rob Koolos on Street names in Noord-Brabant and Holland — this includes Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague — explains the situation when it comes to streets named after women:

Except for the Royal Family (and the wives of William of Orange), before the Second World War, streets named after women were very, very scarce. Aagje Deken and Betje Wolff (writers) and Thérèse Schwartze (painter) were the only women that appeared in more than one of the researched cities. […] After the Second World War, with the second feminist wave and a rapidly growing list of important women, this situation did improve slightly. Leiden and Alphen aan de Rijn for example decided to use only women to name the streets in their new quarters.

I’ve seen street names in Amsterdam named after women like doctors, the wives of famous men, artists and even fictional characters. And if Leiden and Alphen aan de Rijn can do it, so can Amsterdam.

(Link: www.welingelichtekringen.nl, Photo of Warmoesstraat by Olivier Bruchez, some rights reserved)

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March 9, 2013

Lack of women in top management roles in the Netherlands

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 2:55 pm

In the Netherlands 11% of all senior management positions are occupied by women.

Trouw likens the Netherlands to an emirate when it comes to the number of women in top management positions. (I believe they intend that to be an insult, which would be interesting in itself.) For comparison, the United Arab Emirates also sits at 11%. Since this year corporations and government agencies in the UAE are required to have women on their boards.

Of the developed countries (for want of a better word) only Japan fares worse. It has 7% women in management roles. The most emancipated country in the world is China with 51% of all big bosses being women. In fact the top ten of countries has seven nations in it that either are or used to be communist. (The word ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ are oddly lacking from the Grant Thornton report (PDF) that Trouw bases its article on.)

Dutch women do not seem to be very interested in having careers, although they do like having the opportunity of having careers. In 2010 the United Nations voted the Netherlands the most gender equal country in the world.

(Illustration: public domain version of the symbol of feminism, via Wikimedia Commons)

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August 15, 2012

Rotterdames, 3 times 52 odes to the women of Rotterdam

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 11:11 pm

The name may be a bit unfortunate—rot means the same thing in Dutch as it does in English—but what were they to do?

They being three artists who post their own odes to the women of Rotterdam each week at Rotterdames.net, creating a vivid cross section of the second-largest city of the Netherlands in the process. Baschz is the sketch artist, Milan Boonstra the photographer and Janjoost Jullens the writer of the website.

According to De Weekkrant, the artists have already published more than 100 odes and are well on their way to their goal of 156 odes.

The news site quotes Janjoost Jullens about what makes the women of Rotterdam so special: “They are real, more real than anywhere else. They do not need to be pretty in a model kind of way. In Amsterdam the ladies look beautiful from a distance, but when you get closer you see it is all fake. In Rotteram what you see is what you get. We would like to thank the women of Rotterdam for that. Our odes are really a sort of ‘thank you’.”

And in that spirit I would like to tip my hat to Rotterdame Astrid Oosenburg for telling me about this initiative.

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