Posted By: ivillagecares on

Thursday, October 11th, 2007, 10:50 am

Deborah Fine, President, iVillage Properties 

Despite the fact that I surely know better -- far, far better, actually -- I have to admit that the thought of breast cancer scares me to death. And the thought of a breast self exam -- and actually FINDING something, does the same.

I remember as if it were yesterday when my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Not once. Twice. In the end it's probably not what she succumbed to. But, as a teenager standing with her in the hallway of her suburban hospital while she attempted to do her post-mastectomy exercise of climbing her fingers itsy-bitsy-spider-style up the wall, I was literally scared to death.

What scared me even more was the reality of seeing her scar. After all, this was a woman who loved her jewelry -- wearing ALL of it frankly -- and at the same time!

It turns out I'm not the only woman out there dreading the diagnosis of breast cancer. On the iVillage Breast Cancer Support board, women report that they're "worried to the point of tears," "nervous" about finding a lump, scared about their scheduled lumpectomy. Still other iVillagers have triumphed over breast cancer as you can see in our survivors' photo gallery.

The American Cancer Society reports that the number of women getting routine mammograms has fallen 2%, which means that fewer women are being diagnosed. A recent iVillage Index poll reveals that 63% of respondents answer "yes" to having ever skipped a yearly mammogram. Why are women not getting screened? Past research indicates they're unaware they should start screening at age 40, they don't have the funds or access to health centers that screen and they feel it "won't happen to them."

When asked in a national poll about the influence of lifestyle choices on preventing heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, breast cancer and depression, the majority of women feels that breast cancer is more the result of "luck of the draw" vs. lifestyle choices that they make.

While there are no known ways to PREVENT breast cancer, there are ways to reduce the risk of the disease advancing to a stage that's incurable. I urge you to:

- Have a clinical breast exam every three years (if you are under the age of 40)

- Get a mammogram every one to two years after age 40 (or possibly sooner or more often if you're at higher risk for developing breast cancer)

I'm no longer the traumatized young teen in the hallway outside my grandmother's hospital room. I'm now a wife, mother, executive, aunt, philanthropist. I've had my own share of health scares. I'm religious about mammograms and sonograms, and I hope you are too. After all, there's much to be said for catching breast cancer before it develops into a full-blown disease. Just adding routine tests to your yearly doctors' visits can make a difference.

My kids are the ones who motivate me to get screened. My younger guy asks me periodically if a newscast triggers the thought, "hey mom, did you get the boob-o-gram?"

"Yes, Jake." Indeed I did.

Love, mom

P.S. Be sure to check out our five steps to healthier breasts

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Posted By: ivillagecares on

Monday, September 17th, 2007, 4:47 pm

Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, iVillage Cares Advisory Board Member and President of Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT)

In May, the Supreme Court placed limits on an employee's ability to sue for pay discrimination. The controversial ruling establishes a 180-day period during which employees can file lawsuits alleging pay discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin. Because pay discrimination is often difficult to identify immediately, this time limitation seriously hampers an employee's ability to have such situations remedied.

Just because the Supreme Court has struck down this remedy doesn't mean that we have to accept pay discrimination as a fact of life. It's important that we understand why inequities exist and how they occur. And it's also important that each of us take steps, like writing our Congressman and working with our Human Resources department, to make any sort of discrimination unacceptable.

There are many reasons that pay inequity exists, but studies show that some of them are behavioral. Women are less likely than men to ask for more money during a salary negotiation, believing they will be paid a wage comparable to their male counterparts with similar education and experience. Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has demonstrated these disparities and how they occur.1 In her social experiments, Babcock found a number of differences between men and women in negotiation.

- In one experiment where the subjects were told the fee for their time and then offered the base amount, eight times more men than women sought more money.

- When the experiment was re-run and the participants were told that the fee was negotiable, 83 percent of the men -- compared to 58 percent of the women -- asked for more money.

- In another study, Babcock queried graduate students about their job offers and whether they had taken the initial offer or negotiated. 51 percent of the male students, compared to 12.5 percent of the female students tried to negotiate. Those that did negotiate were compensated an average of 7.4 percent higher than their peers who did not negotiate.

This salary negotiation impacts not just the first job, but also those down the road. According to the Washington Post, if a 22-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman are offered $25,000 for their first job and one of them negotiates the amount up to $30,000, then over the next 28 years, the negotiator would make $361,171 more.

However for women, the social risks of engaging in salary negotiation may outweigh the economic benefits. Another study, conducted by Babcock, Carnegie Mellon's Lei Lai, and Harvard's Hannah Riley Bowles, demonstrates how men and women who negotiate are perceived.2

- Both men and women are more likely to subtly penalize women who negotiate and believe that women who ask for more money are "less nice."

- Men tend to punish women who negotiate but were less likely to penalize men; women tended to penalize both men and women, and preferred applicants who did not ask for more.

- Women are less likely than men to negotiate when they thought they would be dealing with a man, but men and women behaved similarly when they thought a woman would be making the final decision

- The negative effect for women is more than twice as large as it is for men.

Companies shouldn't have to wait for their employees to bring inequities to their attention. Internal policies and tools should be put in place to identify and rectify such situations. In the five years that Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) has been conducting the PAR Initiative, we have shared best practices related to pay equity and honored companies in the cable telecommunications industry for their growth and diligence in this area. As a result, the percentage of participating companies with no formal pay equity policy has decreased from 78.57% in 2003 to 7.14% in 2006. Many of these companies conduct quarterly pay equity surveys to identify any disparities and also have specific budgets set aside to correct problems if they are identified so that departmental operating budgets aren't hampered by existing inequities. If you're interested in learning more about WICT's work in this area, visit our PAR Initiative website.

There are things that we can all be doing to ensure that this Supreme Court decision doesn't cause backward progress in the area of equal pay.

- Write to your Senators and let them know that you want them to pass the Fair Pay Restoration Act passed by their colleagues in the House of Representatives. Let your Representative know what you think of their vote. You can do this, and track the progress of this legislation on the NOW Website.

- Make sure that your company has a pay equity policy in place by asking your Human Resources department to see it and explain how it's administered. If they just have the basic EEOC statement, give them some ideas on how they might improve it. The PAR Initiative website I mentioned above is a great place to get some ideas on innovative ways companies in my industry are addressing this problem.

- And when it's time to ask for a promotion or start a new job, don't be afraid to ask for a higher salary; you know the guy across the hall has already taken his check to the bank.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1: Vendentam, Shankar. "Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling." The Washington Post 30 July 2007. p A07.

2: Ibid.

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Posted By: ivillagecares on

Monday, July 30th, 2007, 1:21 pm

"The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today."

Those are the words of the famed cultural anthropologist, Margaret Mead and they are as true today as when she first said them decades ago. Ironically often - too often -- it is adults who pose the greatest threat to children in the form of child abuse.

Child abuse is a trauma that has longstanding after affects not just on the victim but on the society as a whole. The tragedy of the individual is painful enough, but when one looks at the ripple effect of the consequences of child abuse, it becomes all of our jobs to pay closer attention.

According to the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse & Neglect Information, abused children are:

25% more likely to experience teen pregnancy

3 times less likely to practice safe sex, putting them at greater risk for sexually transmitted diseases.

The United States Department of Justice reports even more troubling data in that:

14.4% of all men in prison in the USA were abused as children 36.7% of all women in prison were abused as children Children who experience child abuse & neglect are 59% more likely to be arrested as a juvenile, 28% more likely to be arrested as an adult, and 30% more likely to commit violent crime.

In New York City, where I live, child abuse occurs with a depressing amount of frequency. One in three children experiences some type of abuse before they reach their 18th birthday. Think back to your youth and your teen years. Recall the friends and fun times you may have had. Now imagine that ripped from your life, ripped from your memory having it replaced by thoughts of fear and pain.

That is what it is like for a child who is a victim of abuse.

And what makes it worse -- if such an act could be made worse -- is that more often than not the victim knows and trusts the perpetrator.

Sadly, many cases go unreported or untreated. This leads to a vicious cycle as 1/3 of all abused or neglected children will later abuse their own children, according to the organization ChildHelp.

I am the founder of, the New York Center for Children, which is helping to stop the cycle. The Center is 12 years old, but in those dozen years we have created a child-friendly free clinic, to help victims of child abuse. Each child receives a thorough physical examination from a medical professional and clinically trained social workers, and psychologists talk to children in a sensitive manner to gather the facts, so they can design a course of therapy.

The Center works in coordination with the Police Department, the District Attorney's Office and the Administration for Children's Services, to increase the effectiveness of any investigation and reduce any potential trauma to the child.

Even with all these wonderful resources, the children can use your help. The Center is always in need of volunteers who care about and enjoy children. If time is not something you have in long supply, and would prefer to make a donation, they are gladly accepted. You can do both online.

More importantly if you know of someone who is being abused or if your child has been abused and you are seeking help for you and your child or your family, visit the New York Center for Children online. 

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Posted By: ivillagecares on

Friday, July 20th, 2007, 5:30 pm

Next time you are in Borders or Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore, take a good look around at the people shopping.

Invariably they are picking up books, flipping through the pages, looking at pictures, or reading passages. It is the old adage, "you can't judge a book by its cover."

The same holds true next time you walk down the street. Do you really know what you are seeing?

A case in point would be Philomene Koya.

Not too long ago, you might have seen Philomene exiting a stretch limousine with diplomatic plates, dressed for a fabulous function as part of the affairs of state in her home country and ours. But amid what we might have seen as Philomene's life of glamour was a life of pain, genuine pain.

Here's how she tells the story:

I was living a wonderful life -- my husband was powerful and successful, we moved in all the right circles, and we lived in a beautiful house. But my "perfect life" wasn't perfect at all, for in the privacy of our home, my husband was abusing me.

The abuse began when I enrolled in ESL (English as a Second language) and computer classes. My husband didn't want me going to school, he said that I belonged at home and didn't need an education or to learn English. But I wanted to learn the language of the country I was living in, and I wanted to improve myself by furthering my education, so I attended classes despite his objections and abuse.

During this time I became pregnant. I thought my husband would stop beating me because I was carrying his child. Instead, the abuse worsened, and my husband started to withhold money from me. I had no income of my own, and when he did this I began to realize how vulnerable I was, and how important it was for me to speak good English and to develop some marketable skills.

Unfortunately, before I had the chance to fully accomplish my educational goals -- and after my daughter was born -- my husband went too far. He tried to kill me by poisoning my food. As I lay in the hospital bed, clinging to life but not knowing what life had in store for me, I finally decided I had to take my children and escape... despite having nowhere to go.

I didn't return to my homeland because of threats my husband made about getting to me when I returned to Africa. So for three years my children and I wandered from shelter to shelter. When we had literally run out of places to go, and I had run out of hope, a miracle happened...

That "miracle" was an organization called Second Chance Employment Services. This is a non-profit organization filled with human resources professionals who give people, just what the name implies a second chance at life.

And they pull off little miracle every day by helping at-risk women and their children with career counseling and job placement.

The world and the United States are filled with people who would like to better their life, but just need a helping hand -- not a hand out. Second Chance extends that hand to help welfare recipients, the elderly and financially at-risk women from those skills range from minimal education and experience to skilled professionals. All are placed in meaningful employment positions. It helps them, helps their family and helps the world at large. Just ask Philomene.

I had no hope, no confidence, no job, and no home. The people at Second Chance had an understanding of how women like me feel, and what we need. They did so much along the way to finding a good job for me -- they found me an apartment, daycare for my children, work clothing, and they paid our expenses until my first paycheck arrived from my new job at The World Bank. But besides all of this that can be seen and measured, Second Chance helped me to rebuild my hope and self-confidence, they gave me the moral support I needed to believe in my future and to never again be a victim of abuse.

Wow!!!!!!!!!

So what can you do? Actually a good deal!!!!

The Second Chance web site, which is where you can read other stories like that of Philomene, takes job postings and of course you can always make a donation.

But you can also get involved first hand. If you are human resources professional, your services can be utilized right away. If not, Second Chance has a need for pro bono work for legal services, fundraising, public relations, web sites, salon/image makeovers, dentistry, plastic surgery and counseling.

Too busy? Not sure if it is for you?

Remember one never knows when one will need a second chance.

 

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Posted By: ivillagecares on

Thursday, June 28th, 2007, 12:21 pm

The greatest day in American history -- Independence Day -- is almost here. Across the country, barbecue grills will crackle with hamburgers and hot dogs and fireworks will light up the night time sky in celebration of July 4th.

In fact, this year Americans will spend millions of dollars on fireworks. How much? Well, last year the United States imported $216 million worth of fireworks alone from China.

Now I like a light show as well as the next person. But isn't there a better way for us to spend our money this July 4th -- a way that truly celebrates the fight for independence and honors freedom?

I think there is and it is called Operation Helping Heal.

Not familiar with it? That may be because it is a relatively new organization, one that was created in the wake of the war in Iraq. It was created to help wounded service men and service women who are met with financial difficulties upon their return from the Middle East and Afghanistan.

A recent government study found that a startling 63% of all wounded National Guard and Reservist servicemen and servicewomen, experienced "gaps in their pay which often resulted in financial hardship." The majority of the soldiers currently on duty in Iraq are Reservists and National Guard.

Might not some of that money we spend on fireworks to celebrate America's day of freedom be better spent on the people who are fighting to preserve it?

You can help make this July 4th memorable for you and an American solider by visiting Operation Helping Heal and making a donation right online. Go ahead. I did.

 

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