Why A Women's Center?
1. Conservative estimates indicate that after puberty, 5% to 10% of girls and women ( that translates into 5-10 million girls and women) are struggling with eating disorders including anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder or borderline conditions (Crowther et al. , 1992; Fiarburn et al., 1993; Gordon, 1990; Hoek, 1995; Shisslak et al., 1995)
2. 80% of American women are dissatisfied with their appearance (Smolak, 1996)
3. Conservative estimates of sexual assault prevalence suggest that 25% of American women have been victims of a sexual assault (Abbey, Zawacki, Buck, Clinton, and McAuslan, 2001)
4. For completed and attempted rapes, nearly 90% of the victims knew the offender, who was usually a classmate, friend, ex-boyfriend or acquaintance ("The sexual Victimization of College Women," National Institute of Justice and Bureau of Justice Statistics, January 26, 2001)
5. 1 woman has been nominated as a Presidential or VP candidate by a major political party in the U.S. (www.whitehouse.gov, 2001)
6. Nationally, women make 72 cents of every dollar a man makes. African American women make 65 cents of every dollar and Hispanic women make 52 cents
7. Women account for 2 % of top executives in world businesses (Koss, 1998)
8. In 1998 women held 11.1 % of total board seats on Fortune 500 companies (671 of the 6,064 board seats) up from 10.6% in 1997 (Catalyst, 1998)
9. Women spend about 35.1 hours per week doing housework; men spend about
17.4 hours (Koss, 1998)
For more information, see NWSA Women's Center Resources in the link section.
Answers Added on November 21, 2006
posted by sayleshannon @ 2:22 PM
3 Comments:
This is "why a women's center." As the former chair of the Women's Center Caucus at NWSA, the reason that Women's Centers nationally chose NWSA as our professional organization is because it is FEMINIST. Just because you are a women's college, does not in anyway mean you are a FEMINIST college. Having a women's center provides a feminist base for activism, support, rape crisis, family planning referrals and support and any other kind of programming and referrals that college aged women need. As someone who has been a women's center director for almost 12 years, I'd be happy to help your group in anyway I can.
Juli Parker
Director, WRC
UMass Dartmouth
Affiliate Faculty
Women's Studies
Hi Juli,
I want to thank you for taking the time to make a comment on our blog. I totally agree with your comment and would love to talk futher about this with you.
Thank you!
email: ssayles@twu.edu
I am so happy to see you trying to get the Women's center off the ground and going. This blog cite was a great idea as well and I will absolutely keep my eyes open for any new developments on this project. I feel terrible for missing the meeting about the women’s center though. Keep up the good work.
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