Some good news and some bad news for your International Women's Day. The good news: you no longer use Lysol as your spermicidal douche. I mentioned that Lysol was once marketed as a Plan B earlier this week in my post about Rush's extremely odd way of seeing women's lives. In the 'great minds think alike' category, Mother Jones has taken that farther, offering you a social history slide show of the actual Lysol ads that upped women's anxieties about their marriages and offered to increase marital intimacy-and led to poisonings and death.
Here's some more good news: The gender wage gap has closed to its lowest point ever: 82.2 percent.
But there's bad news: That's only because men's wages have fallen farther than women's during the recession-and because so many more women's wages are already at the legal minimum that they can't fall as much.
Here's the key paragraph from the Institute for Women's Policy Research March 2012 report:
Both men and women's real earnings have declined since 2010; men's real earnings declined by 2.1 percent (from $850 to $832 in 2011 dollars), women's by 0.9 percent (from $690 to $684 in 2011 dollars).
And a happy international women's day to you, too!
