The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has released a report into gender inequality.  Gender equality: What matters to Australian women and men is the result of a nationwide “listening tour” and while it reveals some depressing data, it also shows that inequality is something that men also feel they suffer, too.

It doesn’t make for very pleasant reading. First, the economic stats for women:

• half of all women aged 45 to 59 have $8,000 or less in their superannuation funds, compared to $31,000 for men. [nb: superannuation funds are retirement funds. In Australia, employers are obligated to contribute 9.5% of an employee’s gross salary to a retirement fund]
• Currently, the average superannuation payout for women is a third of the payout for men - $37,000 compared with $110,000.
• In Australia, women working full-time today earn 16 per cent less than men.

Ouch.

Interestingly enough, when it comes to work/life balance, women and men both feel that the working culture of Australia forces unwelcome choices because of gender perception. While Australia is only one of two coutnries in the OECD not to have a paid maternity scheme (marching in lockstep with the US. Axis of Freedom my a$$.), there are arrangements for unpaid maternity leave. There are no legal allowances for paternity leave. Men told the HREOC that they feel they can’t access flexible working hours without significant career damage.

Our very own Karen M's birthday is here. Please join me in wishing this wonderful woman a very happy birthday! May the next year be full of adventure, health, hope and happiness, Karen. And thank you so much for being around MotherTalkers - the place wouldn't be the same without you!!

This is an open thread for those who are training for a race of any shape or kind. Post your training regime for this week and come back to report on your progress. Got a question on training, walking, running, biking, yoga, Pilates, Zumba, aerobics, swimming or anything to do with race preparation? Post it here - someone will know the answer!

I preface this post with a recognition that I’m well on my way to becoming one of those obnoxious bike people  and I’m working hard to avoid the smug superiority that comes with knowing I get from point A to point B with no carbon emissions. After all, I know that I’m one of those slow biking people that I dread seeing when I’m in the car.

With that in mind, I’m delighted to hear of the success of Paris’ cheap bike rental program Vélib’. The program was launched in 2007 by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, and, according to this NY Times article,

About 20,600 Vélib’ bicycles are in service here, with more than 1,450 self-service rental stations. The stations are only some 300 yards apart, and there are four times as many as there are subway stations, even in a city so well served by its metro system.

In the first year, the city says, there have been 27.5 million trips in this city of roughly 2.1 million people, many of them for daily commutes. On average, there are 120,000 trips a day. And on July 27, at the conclusion here of the Tour de France, 365 lucky Vélib’ riders will be chosen to ride along for a while and cross the finish line.

This is an open thread for those who are training for a race of any shape or kind. Post your training regime for this week and come back to report on your progress. Got a question on training, walking, running, biking, yoga, Pilates, Zumba, aerobics, swimming or anything to do with race preparation? Post it here - someone will know the answer!

I'd like to take this opportunity to say that while this thread initally started out as a race training thread, the people have spoken and it has, since the beginning of 2008 (I believe?), been widened to a fitness thread. I've heard from a few of our fellow MTs that they've lurked here, or thought about coming on over, but might have been put off by the appearance of uber-fitness-godessness. To which I say, we are most certainly goddesses, but I'm certainly no elite athelete.

So c'mon by, tell us all what you're doing!

This is an open thread for those who are training for a race of any shape or kind. Post your training regime for this week and come back to report on your progress. Got a question on training, walking, running, biking, swimming or anything to do with race preparation? Post it here - someone will know the answer!

Two things: first, in solidarity with Erika, Gloria and Sandrab, I'm going to re-up for the Melbourne Marathon - the half, anyway. That's fourteen weeks from now. Hey, I exercise most regularly and diligently when I'm training for a race. I might as well embrace that. Anyone else entered into a race of any type?

Second, last week Gloria asked why her fingers swell when she runs - the dread sausage fingers. I did a little tooling around, Gloria, and there seems to be two possible issues, aside from ruling out circulatory problems (egads). Check out this answer. Pls note that it's not from a doctor nor on a medical site.

It is because of

1)Weather:

• Long walks in warm weather.
• Some walkers reported the problem more in cool weather.
• Some thought that higher altitude contributed to more swelling.

Electrolyte imbalance:Electrolytes are the salts in your bloodstream, which must be kept in balance to prevent swelling in the tissues. Sweating without replacing the lost salt can upset this balance.

Too much salt can swing you in the opposite direction and still cause swelling."If you are not taking in adequate electrolytes, the imbalance in salt levels between the blood stream, the cells, and the extracellular spaces essentially results in a trapping of the water in the tissues as the sodium is lost in sweat. The same thing can happen if you are taking in too much salt. For those interested, look up "sodium-potassium pump" in a textbook of physiology to get you started."

2. Good Hydration:One person's physician said the swelling was a sign of good hydration, i.e., of fluids being carried into the capillaries just beneath the skin to promote cooling. This swelling is more noticeable in the extremities. He didn't think it was anything to worry about.

3. Centrifugal Force:If you are walking / running properly, the centrifugal force generated by swinging your arms will gradually lead to edema (swelling) in the hands.

4. Blood Pooling: Swollen fingers/hands are due to blood pooling in the extremities of the body. Blood pooling also occurs in the feet. However, in our legs we have large, efficient muscles that are pretty good at getting the blood pumped back up to the heart. In the hands and fingers, we have smaller muscles that are not as good at getting the blood pumped back up to the heart. So, what you get is numb, tingling, swollen fingers

I occasionally get finger swelling, particularly on hot days and after long runs - I empathize, Gloria. Hope this helps!

This is an open thread for those who are training for a race of any shape or kind. Post your training regime for this week and come back to report on your progress. Got a question on training, walking, running, biking, swimming or anything to do with race preparation? Post it here - someone will know the answer!

This is an open thread for those who are training for a race of any shape or kind. Post your training regime for this week and come back to report on your progress. Got a question on training, walking, running, biking, swimming or anything to do with race preparation? Post it here - someone will know the answer!

This is an open thread for those who are training for a race of any shape or kind. Post your training regime for this week and come back to report on your progress. Got a question on training, walking, running, biking, swimming or anything to do with race preparation? Post it here - someone will know the answer!

This is an open thread for those who are training for a race of any shape or kind. Post your training regime for this week and come back to report on your progress. Got a question on training, walking, running, biking, swimming or anything to do with race preparation? Post it here - someone will know the answer!

True to election promise, the Rudd government is investigating the hows and wherefores of paid parental leave. Australia shares dubious company with the US as being the only OECD country without a paid maternity leave scheme, but hopefully that will change soon.

The Rudd government has asked the Productivity Commission to investigate efficient avenues of implementation. [As a side note, the Productivity Commission is a government agency that researches “economic, social and environmental issues affecting the welfare of Australians. Its role, expressed simply, is to help governments make better policies in the long term interest of the Australian community.” Remember when Al Gore was veep and he had the National Performance Review? Imagine if that was made a separate government agency and you kind of have the Productivity Commission. Enlightened governance, do you remember it?] Currently, the Productivity Commission is conducting public hearings throughout the country. At a hearing last week, the commission heard testimony from the  Women's Action Alliance, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) and the Australian Breastfeeding Association, according to this article in The Age:

CFMEU national secretary John Sutton received applause for his submission calling for 26 weeks' paid maternity leave and four weeks' paternity leave.

He said there was a low rate of participation by women in the industries he represented, specifically mining and construction, and child-rearing issues were the main impediment to increasing their participation.

"By addressing the parental leave issues - and the government has also signalled that childcare is on its radar - if we can move forward as a society and address these two issues, I think we can untap (untap) a great deal of potential labour supply, namely Australian women coming into these high-paid jobs," Mr Sutton said.

"Our industries have been thought of as heavy industries. More and more, a lot of the production is simply operating high-tech machinery... and Australian women are certainly able to operate machinery."

He said the union was "fair dinkum" about maternity and paternity leave.

How cool is it that even heavy industry in Australia recognizes that having a strong regime of paid maternity leave is in their economic best interests?

It’s coming up on college graduation season, and I admit, I haven’t thought about commencement speeches in a long while. I graduated from Boston University in 1999 (high fives to Elisa and Jen “Littlepear”, who also graduated from BU in ’99!). Our commencement speaker that year was Henry Kissinger, and it was an appalling speech. He made an a$$-licking reference to the school’s chancellor, John Silber, and that’s about all I remember from it. And I covered that speech for the Associated Press, my then-employer! I was taking notes and duly relayed quotes to my editor, but today, now, if you held a gun to my head, I couldn’t remember a single inspiring thing he said. I could Google it, but I don’t care enough about the ol’ war criminal (allegedly!) to do so.

I do, however, remember our class speaker, a young woman named Jenny Gruber who was graduating with a combined undergraduate/masters in something like aeronautical engineering and had won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford. She also lived in my building our mutual senior years, and she was (I presume is still) a lovely woman.  She grew up in a Nebraska trailer park, talked about watching her mother struggle to study for her undergraduate degree in teaching, doing homework at the kitchen table. It was a speech filled with beautiful enthusiasm for learning and adventure and gratitude for those who helped her on her way, and that was inspiring.

As I say, I hadn’t thought much about college commencement speeches since 1999, but Gawker linked to a few great speeches, including this one given by Kurt Vonnegut in 1998 at Rice University. Geez, I wish we’d been lucky enough to get this speech, because it was so moving it brought me to tears. Or I’m just hormonal. I allow for that. I’d love to plop the whole thing down here, but I’ll just do the beginning and the end.

Hello.
For those of you getting your first university degrees, I like your generation a lot, and I expect good things from you, and wish you well.

This is a long-delayed puberty ceremony. You are at last officially full-grown men and women -- what you were biologically by the age of fifteen or so. I am sorry as I can be that it took so long and cost so much for you to at last receive licenses as grownups.

I have not calculated how much your diplomas cost in time and money. Whatever those ballpark figures are, they surely deserve this reaction from me today: Wow. Wow. Wow.

Thank you, and God bless you and those who made it possible for you to study at this great American university. By becoming informed and reasonable and capable adults, you have made this a better world than it was before you got here.

Have we met before? No. But I have thought a lot about people like you. You men here are Adam. You women are Eve. Who hasn't thought a lot about Adam and Eve?

This is Eden, and you're about to be kicked out. Why? You ate the knowledge apple. It's in your tummies now.

And who am I? I used to be Adam. But now I am Methuselah.

And who is a serpent among us? Anyone who would strike a child.

So what does this Methuselah have to say to you, since he has lived so long? I'll pass on to you what another Methuselah said to me. He's Joe Heller, author, as you know, of Catch 22. We were at a party thrown by a multi-billionaire out on Long Island, and I said, ''Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that only yesterday our host probably made more money than Catch 22, one of the most popular books of all time, has grossed world-wide over the past forty years?''

Joe said to me, ''I have something he can never have.''

I said, ''What's that, Joe?''

And he said, ''The knowledge that I've got enough.''