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World News

Spain Issued ‘Equality Stamps’ in Pores and skin Tones. The Darker Ones Had been Price Much less.

MADRID – A new campaign by the Spanish Postal Service to condemn racism has backfired, offending many people with a series of stamps in skin tones – the lighter the hue, the more valuable the stamp.

The Equality Stamps were issued this week to mark the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, the black man whose murder by a Minneapolis police officer fueled outrage on the American streets and led to widespread calls for the fight against racism in the United States and America Furthermore. The release of the stamps also coincided with the European Diversity Month.

Moha Gerehou, the author of a new book on racism in Spain, said on Twitter that he understood the postal service was well meant – but said it was badly fired.

It is “a huge contradiction”, he wrote, “a campaign that launches stamps with different values ​​depending on the color to show the same value in our lives. The news is an absolute disaster. “

The cost of the postage starts at € 0.70 (85 cents) for the darkest color, and as the hue becomes progressively lighter, the value for the pale color increases steadily to € 1.60.

The postal service said on Twitter that the pricing was aimed at “reflecting an unfair and painful reality that shouldn’t be,” and that it had hoped the campaign would “give a voice to a generation committed to equality and diversity starts “.

However, some critics said that message was easily lost and that the campaign played into the hands of Vox, the far-right party that became the third largest group in the Spanish parliament after the elections in late 2019.

Mr Gerehou, the author and a Spanish native of Gambian descent, said the postal service had joined an anti-racism push that had spread from the United States to Spain. But he said such efforts “must be accompanied by profound changes”.

The campaign was designed with the help of SOS Racismo, an anti-racism organization, and promoted in a video by El Chojín, a rap artist.

SOS Racismo defended the stamps as “a very visual way of denouncing the racism that affects thousands of people in the Spanish state”.

The group said the campaign also highlighted broader issues such as the rise in xenophobia in Europe and the plight of migrants preparing to make the dangerous journey from North Africa and the Middle East across the Mediterranean to Spain.

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Business

South Asia faces a get up name because it trails in world gender equality

South Asia is on the brink of a wake-up call as it watches the world in its efforts to close the gender gap, an expert told CNBC.

The World Economic Forum predicts that it could now take 195 years to achieve gender equality in the region – 59 years more than the global average.

Corporations have a huge responsibility to fill that void, Sharmini Wainwright, senior managing director at Michael Page Australia recruiting agency, told CNBC.

“It may be a good time to wake up here,” said Wainwright on Thursday.

India in particular still has a long way to go in this regard. The pandemic and other cultural and demographic issues made it an “incredibly challenging year” for the country. Currently, only 13% of senior executives in India are women.

“There is still a long way to go,” said Wainwright. “Big Indian companies really need to push for change.”

The results come from a larger WEF study of the impact of the pandemic on the gender gap. It is now estimated that it will take 135.6 years to achieve gender equality – a generation longer than previously thought.

Western Europe has been a leader in gender equality. The gap is expected to close in 53 years, followed by North America (62 years) and Latin America and the Caribbean (69 years).

Thailand leads the Asia-Pacific region

However, other parts of the Asia-Pacific region showed signs of progress. In Thailand in particular, more than half (53%) of management positions were filled by women in 2020.

Those senior female executives This has usually been a combination of international and local talent, especially within multinational companies in manufacturing and in the supply chain.

“What you have is an economy and a market that is very fast moving and very aggressively pursuing talent,” said Wainwright.

She added that this was also the result of a concerted effort by certain industries such as manufacturing over the past few decades to attract and nurture a pipeline of female executives.

“Now, 20 years later, you have seen the benefits of people who have really taken the opportunity to enjoy exceptional careers in this sector and really advance to leadership positions within the sector,” she said.

More women needed in the top chair

Nevertheless, too few women today occupy the top management position, namely the role of CEO.

According to the report, the top three job titles for female executives were chief finance officer, marketing director and legal director.

Wainwright described this as the next “big breakthrough that has to take place” and urged men to be better allies.

“How do we manage to get that first place? It’s still to come,” she said.

“This conversation is about both men and women. They are usually the ones with the greatest influence in making a change and making a decision.”

Categories
Entertainment

For Girls in Music, Equality Stays Out of Attain

Only 2 percent of the producers of the 100 best songs last year were women, compared to 5 percent last year. Minority women were almost completely excluded from this category: of the 1,291 producer credits for the most popular songs in a 600 song subgroup since 2012, only nine were for women in color.

The report shows that there has been no significant improvement for female creators at the forefront of the music industry in nearly a decade.

The charts are far more diverse when it comes to the ethnic background of performing artists. Last year, 59 percent of the artists behind the top 100 songs were People with Color – a likely expression of the dominance of hip-hop and the way streaming has pushed the globalization of the pop charts. This ratio has generally increased for both men and women over the course of the Annenberg study, although the upward trend is more pronounced for men.

In another announcement, PRS for Music, a major UK copyright society, said 81.7 percent of its members were men, although the pace at which women have joined the organization, which handles licenses and royalties on songs, has increased.

Dr. Data collected by Smith and her colleagues, including Katherine Pieper, Marc Choueiti, Karla Hernandez, and Kevin Yao, are publicly available. But their first study in 2018 – in the middle of the #MeToo movement and after Dr. Smith’s high-profile criticism of Hollywood diversity – still shocked the music industry.

Since then, a number of initiatives have been taken to address underlying issues in the industry, including She Is the Music, a group co-founded by Alicia Keys to promote women through efforts such as mentoring and an employment database. In 2019, the Recording Academy asked the organization behind the Grammys, record labels, producers, and artists to pledge to consider at least two candidates for production and engineering careers. Since then, at least 650 people and companies have registered.

Dr. Smith praised such efforts but said they are not enough.

“The industry needs to move from concern about the numbers,” she said, “to real and concrete steps to remove bias and provide access to the positions and spaces for the talented women who are already in the industry. which remain closed to you. In this case, the numbers reflect this change. “