This article assesses the effectiveness of legal remedies available under the Equal Pay Act (EPA) in closing the gender gap in pay. Although employers frequently attribute women's lesser pay to lags in seniority and the life choices made by women, the evidence suggests that the narrow language of the EPA, its omission of the more subtle forms of sex discrimination, and the powerful disincentives for most women to pursue claims under the act have rendered it largely ineffective in curtailing sex discrimination in compensation. Through an examination of recent developments in the area of pay equality, the article demonstrates that the act, as enforced, has produced neither equality nor equity. Arguing that the reality of sex discrimination in pay shapes life choices (rather than the reverse), the article identifies the obstacles to closing the pay gap and strategies for more effective enforcement.
Although many Americans casually refer to the "institution" of marriage, most rarely consider the implications of that terminology. One enters into marriage by participating in fairly well-defined rites, and couples are warned of the solemnity of the undertaking. But seldom do the parties enter into marriage with a thorough understanding of what it means to subject oneself to governance by thelawof marriage.The law is widely recognized as an institution that may profoundly affect the choices and lives of individuals. It is designed to affect individual behavior, encouraging "appropriate" actions by penalizing those that are seen as problematic for society. Its rules allow for the balancing of competing rights, and the courts provide a remedy when the rules are broken. Marriage law provides ground rules to govern the specific relationship characterized by a lifetime sexual and economic partnership between a man and a woman and endorses that relationship by giving it legal force.
The article examines the pro-life movement's efforts to advance the legal, moral, and political arguments for fetal personhood in the period following the Supreme Court's case Planned Parenthood v. Casey . It begins with an overview of the efforts to define the fetus as a legal person prior to Casey , and proceeds to describe the opportunity created for pro-life forces by the court's ambiguous holding on the issue of personhood.Examining rhetorical and legislative strategies, the article argues that pro-life forces have transformed their framing of the abortion issue, from one that pits fetal rights against maternal rights, to one that emphasizes the unique and intimate bond between the woman and the "child." This rhetorical shift coincides with legislative agendas that indirectly attack the central claim of mainstream pro-choice activists: That the fetus is not a person. The article examines the imagery used by pro-life activists and the substantive statutory reforms they advocate. By casting the relationship between woman and fetus as nonadversarial and pursuing legislation expanding the rights of the fetus, such activists have been effective in establishing indices of fetal personhood. The article contends that these strategies are effective and serve to undermine the rhetorical and legal foundations of the abortion right.
Although international security studies tend to focus on the nature of armed conflict and how nations fare in the face of such conflicts, our attention has been drawn to the challenge of managing the peace. Specifically, given the enormity of the damage caused by state-sponsored violence, both in terms of property and in terms of human damage, how can the people of a nation that has served as a battleground be assisted in their recovery from the devastation caused by conflict? Ongoing trauma from armed conflict has peculiarly gendered dimensions and requires solutions that are attentive to those dimensions. Here, we focus on remedies that shift from perpetrator-centered tribunals to victim-centered compensation commissions. Using the United Nations Compensation Commission established to provide restitution to Kuwaiti citizens following the Iraqi invasion as an example, we argue that the restitution model is a more humane and ethical option for managing the aftermath of conflict than war crimes tribunals, which employ a retributive philosophy. Using the limited evidence available on compensation and rebuilding, we make concrete recommendations for an approach to post-conflict adjudication that makes the well-being of victims its top priority.
Understanding patterns of habitat selection across a species' geographic distribution can be critical for adequately managing populations and planning for habitat loss and related threats. However, studies of habitat selection can be time consuming and expensive over broad spatial scales, and a lack of standardized monitoring targets or methods can impede the generalization of site-based studies. Our objective was to collaborate with natural resource managers to define available nesting habitat for piping plovers (Charadrius melodus) throughout their U.S. Atlantic coast distribution from Maine to North Carolina, with a goal of providing science that could inform habitat management in response to sea-level rise. We characterized a data collection and analysis approach as being effective if it provided low-cost collection of standardized habitat-selection data across the species' breeding range within 1-2 nesting seasons and accurate nesting location predictions. In the method developed, >30 managers and conservation practitioners from government agencies and private organizations used a smartphone application, iPlover, to collect data on landcover characteristics at piping plover nest locations and random points on 83 beaches and barrier islands in 2014 and 2015. We analyzed these data with a Bayesian network that predicted the probability a specific combination of landcover variables would be associated with a nesting site. Although we focused on a shorebird, our approach can be modified for other taxa. Results showed that the Bayesian network performed well in predicting habitat availability and confirmed predicted habitat preferences across the Atlantic coast breeding range of the piping plover. We used the Bayesian network to map areas with a high probability of containing nesting habitat on the Rockaway Peninsula in New York, USA, as an example application. Our approach facilitated the collation of evidence-based information on habitat selection from many locations and sources, which can be used in management and decision-making applications. (c) 2017 The Authors. Wildlife Society Bulletin published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Wildlife Society. ; North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; U.S. Department of the Interior Hurricane Sandy recovery program under the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act; U.S. Geological Survey Coastal and Marine Geology Program ; We thank our federal and private collaborators who supervised, participated in, and coordinated field-testing and data collection (listed in Table S1), particularly H. Abouelezz and T. Pearl for providing spatial data for the Breezy Point Unit of the Gateway National Recreation Area. A. Milliken and A. Hecht of the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, respectively, provided funding and motivation for this research. S. Haefner of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provided code snippets that were used in an alpha version of the iPhone application. We thank N. Booth, M. Schneider, and M. Wernimont of the USGS Office of Water Information and T. Kern and H. Schweizer of the USGS Fort Collins Science Center for their support throughout the development of iPlover. K. Weber of the USGS Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center provided analyses of dune characteristics for the Rockaway Peninsula used in our Geographic Information System analyses. Finally, we appreciate comments on earlier versions of this manuscript made by A. Hecht, N. Ganju, the editorial staff at the Wildlife Society Bulletin, Associate Editor Donahgy Cannon, and 4 anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of the Interior Hurricane Sandy recovery program under the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey Coastal and Marine Geology Program, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
Humans have altered nearly every natural disturbance regime on the planet through climate and land-use change, and in many instances, these processes may have interacting effects. For example, projected shifts in temperature and precipitation will likely influence disturbance regimes already affected by anthropogenic fire suppression or river impoundments. Understanding how disturbance-dependent species respond to complex and interacting environmental changes is important for conservation efforts. Using field-based demographic and movement rates, we conducted a metapopulation viability analysis for piping plovers (Charadrius melodus), a threatened disturbance-dependent species, along the Missouri and Platte rivers in the Great Plains of North America. Our aim was to better understand current and projected future metapopulation dynamics given that natural disturbances (flooding or high-flow events) have been greatly reduced by river impoundments and that climate change could further alter the disturbance regime. Although metapopulation abundance has been substantially reduced under the current suppressed disturbance regime (high-flow return interval similar to 20 yr), it could grow if the frequency of high-flow events increases as predicted under likely climate change scenarios. We found that a four-year return interval would maximize metapopulation abundance, and all subpopulations in the metapopulation would act as sources at a return interval of 15 yr or less. Regardless of disturbance frequency, the presence of even a small, stable source subpopulation buffered the metapopulation and sustained a low metapopulation extinction risk. Therefore, climate change could have positive effects in ecosystems where disturbances have been anthropogenically suppressed when climatic shifts move disturbance regimes toward more historical patterns. Furthermore, stable source populations, even if unintentionally maintained through anthropogenic activities, may be critical for the persistence of metapopulations of early-successional species under both suppressed disturbance regimes and disturbance regimes where climate change has further altered disturbance frequency or scope. ; Nebraska Environmental Trust ; Nebraska State Wildlife Grant Program ; Nebraska Wildlife Conservation Fund ; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) ; USFWS North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative ; Virginia Tech ; Funding was provided by the Nebraska Environmental Trust, the Nebraska State Wildlife Grant Program, the Nebraska Wildlife Conservation Fund, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the USFWS North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and Virginia Tech. We thank C. Aron, K. Brennan, R. Cobb, K. Crane, E. Dowd-Stukel, C. Huber, K. Kreil, C. Kruse, G. Pavelka, G. Wagner, W. Werkmeister, S. Wilson, L. Yager, and cooperators from the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, South Dakota Department of Game, Fish, and Parks, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, and the Missouri River Institute for support throughout the project. We would like to thank sand and gravel mining companies and lakeshore housing development communities for access to property. We acknowledge the tireless efforts of our many technicians from 2005 to 2013. We also thank five anonymous reviewers, T. Simmons, and C. McGowan (USGS) for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This work was conducted under Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee permits 877 and 14-003, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Threatened and Endangered Species Permits TE070027-0 and TE103272-3. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.
