Engaging and Mobilizing Men to Promote Women\u27s Human Rights

Over the past twenty years, there have been increasing of and progressively more effective efforts to engage, mobilize and organize men in support of advancing women’s human rights. The Declaration from the UN conference on Women in Beijing, the Declaration from the UN Report on, and the UNHCR Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women all make powerful statements as to the need to engage men and boys in efforts to promote and enhance gender equality and women’s human rights. Most recently, the UN HCR agreed upon Declaration 35/10 (2017) outlined in very concrete and specific ways that male engagement is an essential of efforts to achieve gender equality and advance women’s human rights. The reasons for engaging men are quite clear. All human beings have a gender and as such, all need to be engaged in efforts to achieve gender equality. In addition, however, men hold disproportionate positions of power, dominance and authority that impact on the ability to achieve gender equality. If efforts to achieve gender equality continue to solely focus on women and girls, then men will continue to be left out of the conversations, planning and engagement. Some of these men hold positions of power and authority in the very institutions that are needed to create the structural and instrumental changes needed to achieve gender equality. In addition, the available evidence clearly indicates that to the degree that countries, states and locales are successful in moving towards gender equality, men benefit as well (although perhaps not to the degree for women and girls). In places in which substantive strides have been made towards gender equality, men report higher rates of life satisfaction, higher rates of happiness and fulfillment, increase indicators on a variety of measures related to improved health and wellness, improved job/career satisfaction, and more. Achieving gender equality appears to be a win-win phenomenon. While there is clear consensus that men need to be actively and substantively involved if we are to achieve gender equality and women’s human rights, less attention (until very recently) has been paid to how to do so effectively. This short paper outlines some of the key lessons that have been learned that point to strategies and methods that appear to be most effective in engaging men and boys to achieve gender equality

in Violence Against Women, (2002)

This substantial article examines the issues of men who are victimized by domestic violence in heterosexual relationships. Over the past several years, there has increasing attention to the issues of men who are victimized by heterosexual domestic violence, most of which is based on research done that is based on the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS) developed by Murray Straus and Richard Gelles. In this current paper, Kimmel addresses the research that suggests men are victimized as often as women from both substantive and methodological perspectives. Through the process, Kimmel also addresses the CTS and raises substantive issues with the continued use of this tool to examine domestic violence. Kimmel notes that the language (both media and in much of the specialized literature and theory) describing domestic violence has increasingly come to be that of gender symmetry. Review of the research (Fierbert, 1997, Archer, 2000) found that between 79 and 82 empirical and 16 review articles that demonstrated gender symmetry. As Kimmel notes, these studies “raise troubling questions ” about what has come to be accepted as relatively common knowledge about domestic violence – that it is something men do to women, that it is one of the leading causes of serious injury to women, and that it is one of the world’s most widespread public health issues. Beyond this, however, the research suggesting gender symmetry raises far more questions than it supposed answers. These questions largely revolv

LensKit for Python: Next-Generation Software for Recommender Systems Experiments

LensKit is an open-source toolkit for building, researching, and learning about recommender systems. First released in 2010 as a Java framework, it has supported diverse published research, small-scale production deployments, and education in both MOOC and traditional classroom settings. In this paper, I present the next generation of the LensKit project, re-envisioning the original tool\u27s objectives as flexible Python package for supporting recommender systems research and development. LensKit for Python (LKPY) enables researchers and students to build robust, flexible, and reproducible experiments that make use of the large and growing PyData and Scientific Python ecosystem, including scikit-learn, and TensorFlow. To that end, it provides classical collaborative filtering implementations, recommender system evaluation metrics, data preparation routines, and tools for efficiently batch running recommendation algorithms, all usable in any combination with each other or with other Python software. This paper describes the design goals, use cases, and capabilities of LKPY, contextualized in a reflection on the successes and failures of the original LensKit for Java software