Arquivo da tag: Gênero

Gene That Predicts Happiness in Women Discovered (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2012) — A new study has found a gene that appears to make women happy, but it doesn’t work for men. The finding may help explain why women are often happier than men, the research team said.

A new study has found a gene that appears to make women happy, but it doesn’t work for men. The finding may help explain why women are often happier than men. (Credit: © Yuri Arcurs / Fotolia)

Scientists at the University of South Florida (USF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute reported that the low-expression form of the gene monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is associated with higher self-reported happiness in women. No such association was found in men.

The findings appear online in the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry.

“This is the first happiness gene for women,” said lead author Henian Chen, MD, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, USF College of Public Health.

“I was surprised by the result, because low expression of MAOA has been related to some negative outcomes like alcoholism, aggressiveness and antisocial behavior,” said Chen, who directs the Biostatistics Core at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. “It’s even called the warrior gene by some scientists, but, at least for women, our study points to a brighter side of this gene.”

While they experience higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders, women tend to report greater overall life happiness than do men. The reason for this remains unclear, Chen said. “This new finding may help us to explain the gender difference and provide more insight into the link between specific genes and human happiness.”

The MAOA gene regulates the activity of an enzyme that breaks down serontin, dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain — the same “feel-good” chemicals targeted by many antidepressants. The low-expression version of the MAOA gene promotes higher levels of monoamine, which allows larger amounts of these neurotransmitters to stay in the brain and boost mood.

The researchers analyzed data from a population-based sample of 345 individuals — 193 women and 152 men — participating in Children in the Community, a longitudinal mental health study. The DNA of study subjects had been analyzed for MAOA gene variation and their self-reported happiness was scored by a widely used and validated scale.

After controlling for various factors, ranging from age and education to income, the researchers found that women with the low-expression type of MAOA were significantly happier than others. Compared to women with no copies of the low-expression version of the MAOA gene, women with one copy scored higher on the happiness scale and those with two copies increased their score even more.

While a substantial number of men carried a copy of the “happy” version of the MAOA gene, they reported no more happiness than those without it.

So, why the genetic gender gap in feeling good?

The researchers suspect the difference may be explained in part by the hormone testosterone, found in much smaller amounts in women than in men. Chen and his co-authors suggest that testosterone may cancel out the positive effect of MAOA on happiness in men.

The potential benefit of MAOA in boys could wane as testosterone levels rise with puberty, Chen said. “Maybe men are happier before adolescence because their testosterone levels are lower.”

Chen emphasizes that more research is needed to identify which specific genes influence resilience and subjective well-being, especially since studies of twins estimate genetic factors account for 35 to 50 percent of the variance in human happiness.

While happiness is not determined by a single gene, there is likely a set of genes that, along with life experiences, shape our individual happiness levels, Chen said. “I think the time is right for more genetic studies that focus on well-being and happiness.”

“Certainly it could be argued that how well-being is enhanced deserves at least as much attention as how (mental) disorders arise; however, such knowledge remains limited.”

The study by Chen and colleagues was supported by the National Institutes of Health and a USF proposal enhancement grant.

Journal Reference:

  1. Henian Chen, Daniel S. Pine, Monique Ernst, Elena Gorodetsky, Stephanie Kasen, Kathy Gordon, David Goldman, Patricia Cohen. The MAOA gene predicts happiness in women. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 2012; DOI:10.1016/j.pnpbp.2012.07.018

O poder das mulheres nas famílias (O Globo)

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São 22 milhões que assumiram a responsabilidade em 38,7% dos lares

CÁSSIA ALMEIDA e LETÍCIA LINS

Publicado:27/08/12 – 23h06 / Atualizado:28/08/12 – 11h58

<br /><br /> Maria Pamposa de Lima, 47 comanda sua casa há 17 anos e criou 5 filhos sozinha, na foto os filhos Fabiane de Lima, 27, Fabio Lins Lima da Silva, 22 e o neto David Venicius, 7.<br /><br /> Foto: Hans von Manteuffel / Hans von ManteuffelMaria Pamposa de Lima, 47 comanda sua casa há 17 anos e criou 5 filhos sozinha, na foto os filhos Fabiane de Lima, 27, Fabio Lins Lima da Silva, 22 e o neto David Venicius, 7.HANS VON MANTEUFFEL / HANS VON MANTEUFFEL

RECIFE E RIO – No Nordeste é cada vez mais comum domicílios comandados por mulheres, tanto na capital quanto no interior. E ocorre em duas condições: quando a mulher mora só com os filhos, ou quando tem companheiro, mas é ela quem manda nas finanças e se considera chefe da família. Nas estatísticas, as mulheres são as responsáveis em 38,7% dos domicílios, o que representa 22 milhões de unidades, de acordo com o último censo demográfico do IBGE, de 2010. No levantamento anterior, em 2000, essa chefia feminina estava em 24,9% dos lares.

O casamento ruim não prende mais as mulheres. É o caso de Maria Pamposa de Lima, de 48 anos que, desde os 31 anos, luta sozinha para criar os cinco filhos. Já trabalhou em reciclagem quando morava em um barraco de lona e pedaços de madeira. Hoje está no mercado formal de trabalho atuando como servente em um bar no bairro de Casa Forte, na zona norte da capital pernambucana. Ela deixou marido porque ele bebia muito, exigia dinheiro para alimentar o vício e terminou morrendo de cirrose hepática.

Ela ganha um salário mínimo e complementa a renda familiar juntando as latas de cerveja do restaurante. Dos cinco filhos, quatro moram com ela, dois trabalham e só uma chegou à universidade, Fabiana. A jovem trabalha na prefeitura de Moreno, onde entrou por concurso, e estuda pedagogia. Afirma que a mãe é pobre, que viveu e vive em muita dificuldade, mas que criou a família baseada nos princípios da ética, da moral, da honestidade e de amor ao próximo.

— Moramos muito tempo em casa de invasão (hoje substituída por uma de alvenaria) e nossa vida foi muito sofrida. Mas ninguém na família se envolveu com drogas — diz Fabiana.

Além das latinhas para reforçar o orçamento, Maria transformou um dos quartos da casa em uma lojinha que lhe rende um pequeno aluguel.

‘Cuido de tudo: do negócio ao dinheiro’

Vizinha de Pamposa, Maria Jocelma da Silva, de 37 anos, tem uma história diferente. Ela vive com o companheiro, Ademilton Bispo de Melo, de 47 anos, mas se considera a chefe da família. Jocelma montou um pequeno restaurante em uma sala da residência e o marido trabalho como cozinheiro.

—Aqui a chefe sou eu. Cuido de tudo, do negócio, das compras, das finanças. O dinheiro espicha na minha mão. Se eu deixar com ele acaba logo, justifica.

Ademiltom afirma que apesar do machismo nordestino, não dá importância à situação:

—Não ligo não. Vivemos em união e é tudo com ela, a casa, o negócio, o dinheiro. Hoje a mulher faz tudo, é engenheira, é peão de obra, é cobradora no ônibus e é até presidente.

VEJA TAMBÉM

Leia mais sobre esse assunto em http://oglobo.globo.com/economia/o-poder-das-mulheres-nas-familias-5918850#ixzz252DcZoN0 © 1996 – 2012. Todos direitos reservados a Infoglobo Comunicação e Participações S.A. Este material não pode ser publicado, transmitido por broadcast, reescrito ou redistribuído sem autorização. 

Renaissance Women Fought Men, and Won (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2012) — A three-year study into a set of manuscripts compiled and written by one of Britain’s earliest feminist figures has revealed new insights into how women challenged male authority in the 17th century.

Dr Jessica Malay has painstakingly transcribed Lady Anne Clifford’s 600,000-word Great Books of Record, which documents the trials and triumphs of the female aristocrat’s family dynasty over six centuries and her bitter battle to inherit castles and villages across northern England.

Lady Anne, who lived from 1590 to 1676, was, in her childhood, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Her father died when she was 15 but contrary to an agreement that stretched back to the time of Edward II — that the Clifford’s vast estates in Cumbria and Yorkshire should pass to the eldest heir whether male or female ­- the lands were handed over to her uncle.

Following an epic legal struggle in which she defied her father, both her husbands, King James I and Oliver Cromwell, Lady Anne finally took possession of the estates, which included the five castles of Skipton, where she was born, Brougham, Brough, Pendragon and Appleby, aged 53.

Malay, a Reader in English Literature at the University of Huddersfield, is set to publish a new, complete edition of Lady Anne’s Great Books of Record, which contains rich narrative evidence of how women circumvented male authority in order to participate more fully in society.

Malay said: “Lady Anne’s Great Books of Record challenge the notion that women in the 16th and 17th centuries lacked any power or control over their own lives.

“There is this misplaced idea that the feminist movement is predominantly a 1960s invention but debates and campaigns over women’s rights and equality stretch back to the Middle Ages.”

The Great Books of Record comprise three volumes, the last of which came up for auction in 2003. The Cumbria Archives bought the third set and now house all three. In 2010, Malay secured a £158,000 grant from the Leverhulme Trust to study the texts.

Malay said: “Virginia Woolf argued that a woman with Shakespeare’s gifts during the Renaissance Period would have been denied the opportunity to develop her talents due to the social barriers restricting women.

“But Lady Anne is regarded as a literary figure in her own right and when I started studying the Great Books of Record I realised there is a lot more to her writing than we were led to believe.

“I was struck by how much they revealed about the role of women, the importance of family networks and the interaction between lords and tenants over 500 years of social and political life in Britain.”

In her Great Books of Record, Lady Anne presents the case for women to be accepted as inheritors of wealth, by drawing on both documentary evidence and biographies of her female ancestors to reveal that the Clifford lands of the North were brought to them through marriage.

She argued that since many men in the 16th and 17th centuries had inherited their titles of honour from their mothers or grandmothers, it was only right that titles of honour could be passed down to female heirs.

She also contended that women were well suited to the title of Baron since a key duty of office was to provide counsel in Parliament, where women were not allowed. While men were better at fighting wars, women excelled in giving measured advice, she wrote.

Malay said: “Lady Anne appropriates historical texts, arranging and intervening in these in such a way as to prove her inevitable and just rights as heir.

“Her foregrounding of the key contributions of the female to the success of the Clifford dynasty work to support both her own claims to the lands of her inheritance and her decision to resist cultural imperatives that demanded female subservience to male authority.

“Elizabeth I was a strong role model for Lady Anne in her youth. While she was monarch, women had a level of access to the royal court that men could only dream of, which spawned a new sense of confidence among aristocratic women.”

Malay’s research into the Great Books of Record, which contain material from the early 12th century to the early 18th century, reveals the importance of family alliances in forming influential political networks.

It shows that women were integral to the construction of these networks, both regionally and nationally.

Malay said: “The Great Books explain the legal avenues open to women. Married women could call on male friends to act on their behalf. As part of marriage settlements many women had trusts set up to allow them access to their own money which they could in turn use in a variety of business enterprises or to help develop a wide network of social contacts.

“Men would often rely on their wives to access wider familial networks, leading to wives gaining higher prestige in the family.”

Lady Anne was married twice and widowed twice. After her second husband died she moved back to the North and, as hereditary High Sherriff of Westmorland, set about restoring dilapidated castles, almshouses and churches.

Malay said: “Widows enjoyed the same legal rights as men. While the husband was alive then the wife would require his permission to do anything. Widows were free to act on their own without any male guardianship.”

The Great Books also provide a valuable insight into Medieval and Renaissance society, with one document describing a six-year-old girl from the Clifford family being carried to the chapel at Skipton on her wedding day.

Lady Anne also recounted her father’s voyages to the Caribbean and she kept a diary of her own life, which includes summaries of each year from her birth until her death at the age of 86 in 1676.

Malay said: “The books are full of all sorts of life over 600 years, which is what is so exciting about them.”

Malay’s Anne Clifford Project, the Great Books of Record was the catalyst for an exhibition of the Great Books of Record, which are, for the first time, being exhibited in public alongsideThe Great Picture at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal.

The Great Picture is a huge (so huge a window of the gallery had to be removed to accommodate its arrival) triptych that marks Lady Anne’s succession to her inheritance.

The left panel depicts Lady Anne at 15, when she was disinherited. The right panel shows Lady Anne in middle age when she finally regained the Clifford estates. The central panel depicts Lady Anne’s parents with her older brothers shortly after Lady Anne had been conceived.

Time to tackle ‘last taboo’ of contraception and climate – experts (Alert Net)

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29 Feb 2012 11:13

Source: Alertnet // Lisa Anderson

A health worker explains methods of contraception during a reproductive health fair held to mark World Population Day in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines, July 11, 2009. REUTERS/John Javellana

By Lisa Anderson

NEW YORK (AlertNet) – Finding a way to put the environmental impact of population and women’s reproductive health more prominently on the climate change agenda is increasingly urgent, experts said in Washington this week.

Suggesting a strong connection between family planning and the environment often risks an explosion in the highly charged political landscape of climate talks, meaning the word “population” is rarely heard, observed speakers on a panel assembled by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP).

Kavita Ramdas, executive director of Stanford University’s social entrepreneurship program, calls making the link between population and the environment “the last taboo”.

“This connection … needs to be in a place where we can talk thoughtfully about the fact that yes, more people on this planet – and we’ve just crossed 7 billion – does actually put pressure on the planet. And no, it is not just black women or brown women or Chinese women who create that problem,” she told a session on women’s health and climate adaptation strategies.

“In fact, the issues around consumption in the more developed part of the world are profoundly significant. And when you know that every American baby born consumes 40 times as much as every Indian baby born, clearly there is a need to be able to tie those issues together,” she added.

Daniel Schensul, a technical specialist in the climate change, population and development branch of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), noted that adapting to a shifting climate amounts to building resilience in the face of change. “Women’s ability to control fertility, I think, is at the very centre of this,” he said.

Kathleen Mogelgaard, a consultant on the Wilson Center’s ECSP, described universal access to reproductive health as “a win-win opportunity for climate change adaptation”. Compared with other adaptation strategies, family planning is already in demand among women around the world, although many lack access to it, she said.

And it’s relatively inexpensive, she added, requiring only an additional $3.6 billion a year to fully meet women’s reproductive health needs.

FEAR OF LIMITING RIGHTS

Nonetheless, social and political barriers to including population in climate discussions persist, Stanford University’s Ramdas said. Climate experts avoid talking about population issues out of fear they will be labelled racists or eugenicists, and in an effort “not to muddy the waters” surrounding the already delicate subject of climate change, she said.

“At the same time women’s rights activists also have been reluctant to jump into the argument. You can’t discuss contraception without being drawn into a debate about abortion,” she added.

The ECSP’s Mogelgaard noted that population is rarely included in assessments of climate change vulnerability and adaptation. In her experience, climate specialists have a limited understanding of population dynamics and the scale of coming demographic change – such as populations tripling in countries like Malawi by 2050.

And, if they do grasp the issues, they “assume that doing something about population means limiting people’s rights,” she said. “What this says to me is that there is a real need for raising awareness of the connection between population, climate change and reproductive health.”

More academic evidence supporting the connection would help get population considered as a legitimate issue in the climate community, the experts argued. “There hasn’t been enough work that directly shows us that, when a woman’s need for reproductive health is met, how that impacts on adaptation,” Mogelgaard said.

She knows of only one study – “Linking Population, Fertility and Family Planning with Adaptation to Climate Change: Views from Ethiopia”, issued byPopulation Action International (PAI) in October 2009 – that “shows that when women have access to reproductive health they say they are better able to cope with climate change”.

Schensul said UNFPA wants to see population and reproductive health on the June agenda of Rio+20, the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development. To that end, it is working with partners to “establish a nuanced, evidence-based and human rights-based perspective on the operational links between population, reproductive health and climate change”.

If these inter-related factors remain neglected in climate discussions, “silence around this issue will continue to leave us in a space where the planet and her women will continue to have no voice,” Ramdas warned.

Women in Prison: An Issue of Blaming the Individual for Social Problems (Science Daily)

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Science Daily (Oct. 11, 2011) — Researchers have long claimed that physical abuse and marginalization lead to criminal activity; however, women in prison are taught to overlook socioeconomic issues and blame only themselves for their behavior, according to a new study published in SAGE Open.

Authors Traci Schlesinger and Jodie Michelle state that there is a real connection between the type of abuse experienced by women, marginalization, and whether or not they will turn to drugs and criminal activity to cope with their experiences. Still, the authors contend current psychiatric and popular discourse portrays female incarceration as the result of poor choices and bad behavior “rather than identifying structural conditions that lead to imprisonment — including changes in laws, racist and sexist legislation, poverty, lack of resources and jobs, and social vulnerability over the course of one’s life.”

The authors analyzed surveys from 170 incarcerated women as well as personal history interviews conducted with 11 formerly imprisoned women and found that women who experience non-sexual physical abuse as well as any type of abuse as adults are more likely to begin using drugs, while women who are victims of sexual abuse as children claim that their imprisonment is a direct, nearly inevitable result of their abuse. They also found that marginalized women (such as women whose parents were also incarcerated and women who were unemployed at the time of their arrest) are more likely to turn to drugs to deal with interpersonal violence than women with the resources to find other ways to cope with their experiences of violence.

“Having few or no options because of their marginalized socioeconomic positions, entrenched racial inequality, and repeated episodes of violence, respondents indicated that criminalized activities became survival mechanisms, which led to incarceration,” write the authors.
The authors point to institutional change and support systems for victims of abuse as a way to prevent female criminal activity.

The authors wrote, “Radical education, community support, decriminalization, job creation, and automatic expungement could work together to push back against the web of interpersonal and state violence experienced by so many marginalized women.”