Margaret Thatcher and Women in Government

“I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.”

— Margaret Thatcher

One of the world’s most powerful women died today.  Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s only woman prime minister, was 87.

Thatcher, leader of the country’s Conservative Party, was British prime minister from 1979 to 1990.  According to CNN.com, she shared “a close working relationship” with former President Ronald Reagan, “with whom she shared similar conservative views.” Initially dubbed “Iron Lady” by Soviet journalists, she was well known (for better or for worse) for her personal and professional toughness. (For interesting commentary on Thatcher and her impact, see here, here, and here.)                                               

Thatcher was a trailblazer, one of just a very few women to become heads of their country’s government. While women make up nearly half of the world’s population, worldwide, they represent roughly 16% of the members of national governing bodies.  In the United States, women account for only 18.1% of Congress, 33% of the United States Supreme Court, and no woman has ever been elected president.

So, what’s the problem? Some would argue that there’s nothing stopping women from running for office, even for president. True, there are no laws that outright prohibit women’s participation in government.  (Saudia Arabia, long the hold out on allowing women to vote and to serve in government, has finally reversed course.)  But there are other barriers that may be less obvious.

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Tale of Three States: Minnesota’s Surprisingly Large Supervised Population

As noted here a few weeks ago, my forthcoming article comparing imprisonment trends in Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in now available on-line.  Due to space constraints, I was unable to include in the article all of the interesting data I have collected on the three states.  I’ll present some of that additional material in an occasional series of posts here.

Today, let’s take a look at the supervised populations of the three states.  The supervised population is comprised of four subgroups: those in prisons, those in jails, those on probation, and those out on post-imprisonment supervised release (a status that goes by different names in different jurisdictions, but which I will call parole).  As is well known, Minnesota has a remarkably low imprisonment rate (at least by U.S. standards), although all three states have experienced an  imprisonment boom since the 1970s.  Here are the imprisonment numbers, reflecting the number of prisoners per 100,000 state residents: 

imprisonment numbers

 

 

As the graph indicates, Minnesota has maintained a consistently lower imprisonment rate than the other two states since the mid-1960s.  Indeed, the Minnesota advantage has tended to widen over time.  By contrast, Indiana has generally had the highest imprisonment rate, although Wisconsin has been close at times, and even took the lead for a few years.

The story is quite different, however, if you consider the supervision numbers more broadly. 

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On Awareness for Environmental Poverty Lawyering

Earth month, April, provides an opportunity for everyone to reflect on how we treat our largest shared resource: the Earth itself. Use of this resource often brings to mind drilling in wildlife areas or deforestation in any number of places worldwide. However, I would like to draw attention to the environmental dangers we face in urban areas: dangerous environmental practices that tend not to come to light because they are overshadowed by major environmental disasters and because these dangers affect only those people least able to help themselves.

Many poverty-stricken communities are subject to environmental dangers with no ability to remedy them. The problems these communities face are seemingly unlimited, from the building of low-income housing developments on former toxic waste dumps, as in Love Canal, New York, to the systematic destruction of local parks and recreational areas in order to develop industry. The reasons impoverished communities often have no voice in these decisions are two-fold: (1) a lack of historical recognition of impoverished communities in the law, and (2) disorganization in the communities themselves.

In addressing the first point it is important to note that many of the environmental and community dangers across the country arising from commercial and industrial development are legal.  

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