Monday, February 19, 2018: Adrienne Maree Brown - Visionary Social Change

This Monday February 19th on KPFA Radio’s Women’s Magazine, Viveka Jagadeseen talks to author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown about how we can organize a resilient mass movement capable of creating fundamental social change in today's political climate with an understanding of social change inspired by the resilience and adaptive nature of biological systems, that is non hierarchical and non harming.

Adrienne Maree Brown, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.  Brown is the Co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, and author most recently of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds a book described as a "resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us” and expands our radical imagination.


Click here to listen to the show. 59:50 min

Monday, February 6, 2017: Hidden Figures

Women's Magazine kicks off Black History month by celebrating unsung Black women sheroes. We listen to an interview with Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the book HIDDEN FIGURES, the basis for the hit movie about Black women mathematicians who worked in the space program.

You've heard the names John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong. What about Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, Kathryn Peddrew, Sue Wilder, Eunice Smith or Barbara Holley? Most Americans have no idea that from the 1940s through the 1960s, a cadre of African-American women formed part of the country’s space work force, or that this group—mathematical ground troops in the Cold War—helped provide NASA with the raw computing power it needed to dominate the heavens.

HIDDEN FIGURES: THE AMERICAN DREAM AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE BLACK WOMEN MATHEMATICIANS WHO HELPED WIN THE SPACE RACE recovers the history of these pioneering women and situates it in the intersection of the defining movements of the American century: the Cold War, the Space Race, the Civil Rights movement and the quest for gender equality.

Click here to listen to entire show. 59:50 min


Also on today's show:
Pauli Murray
When Abortion Was Illegal

Monday, July 20, 2015: Interview with WHO researcher Meghan Bohren

At today's launch of KPFA Women's Magazine Kate Raphael pays tribute to Dr.Claudia Alexander, African-American space scientist who led the Galileo mission to Jupiter and managed the Rosetta comet program. She died this month at age 56.











“The Mistreatment of Women During Childbirth in Health Facilities Globally: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Review” is a survey of 65 studies from 34 countries.  Its findings are part of the evaluation of the Millennium Development Goals, or MDG, eight objectives established by the United Nations in 2000.  We talk with researcher Meghan Bohren of the World Health Organization.

An infant in a hospital in Tanzania, where a study found
that 28 percent of women reported mistreatment
by health workers. CreditBéatrice de Géa for The New York Times

New York Times reports on WHO study on June 30, 2015: Widespread Mistreatment by Health Workers During Childbirth.

Women need to be sure that they will receive dignified and respectful care during childbirth. Unfortunately, recent studies have indicated that women are often exposed to neglectful, abusive, and disrespectful care (care that local consensus regards as humiliating or undignified) during childbirth in health facilities.

Listen to this interview or Get MP3. 11:19 min.






The 8 Millennium Development Goals

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health?
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

Listen to entire show. 59:50 min

Also on today's show:
A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
3 Girls Theater

Monday July 13, 2015: Attracting Women to Science

graphic by Sarah Mazzetti

And continuing our exploration of how to attract women to scientific and engineering fields, in which they’re vastly underrepresented, we speak with Lina Nilsson, innovation director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley.  In a controversial New York Times op-ed in April, Nilsson described an engineering program that without even trying, achieved gender parity.  Find out how.

Listen now or Get MP3. 16:08 min.






Listen to entire show. 59:50 min.

Also on today's show:
Plowshares Activist Sr. Megan Rice

Monday, March 16, 2015: Gender Bias Against Women of Color in Science

100% of Women of Color experience gender bias at work.

Kate Raphael talks with Joan C. Williams, founding director of the UC Hastings Center for Work Life Law about her new study, Double Jeopardy: Gender Bias Against Women of Color in Science. Williams, the coauthor of the book What Works For Women At Work, also talks about strategies for interrupting workplace bias.

Listen now or Get MP3. 26:26





A new study, Double Jeopardy released from the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings combines in-depth interviews of 60 women of color in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) with a survey of 557 women in STEM (both women of color and white women), and finds pervasive gender bias.

The report introduces a new approach to organizational change to interrupt gender bias, called Metrics-Based Bias Interrupters, developed by Professor Williams last year.

Bias Interrupters uses a four-step iterative process: 1) survey women to find out whether they think gender bias is playing out in basic business systems (recruiting, assignments, evaluations, etc.); 2) develop objective metrics to test whether women’s perceptions are accurate; 3) implement “Bias Interrupters” to interrupt bias in real time; 4) see whether the relevant metric improves and, if it doesn’t, strengthen or modify the intervention.

Williams’s work on the advancement of women can be found online at www.newgirlsnet.com and www.toolsforchangeinSTEM.org. You can follow her on her Huffington Post blog or on Twitter @JoanCWilliams. The WorkLife Law website is www.worklifelaw.org.

Click here to listen to entire show. 59:50 min.

Also on today's program:
5 Black Women Historical Figures

Monday, August 11, 2014: Conversation with Karen Joy Fowler

This week on Women's Magazine, Kate Raphael is in conversation with Karen Joy Fowler, whose novel WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES has won the Pen Faulkner Prize for 2013 and has recently been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.  Fowler cofounded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for speculative fiction which challenges or expands our concepts of gender.

Karen Joy talks about her writing process, genre vs. literary fiction, where she finds ideas for her writings and why she writes. Ultimately she strives to write books that are fun to read and entertaining.

Read below what other writers are saying about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

“You know how people say something is incredible or unbelievable when they mean it’s excellent? Well, Karen Joy Fowler’s new book is excellent: utterly believable and completely credible – a funny, moving, entertaining novel that is also an important and unblinking review of a shameful chapter in the history of science.”

—Dr. Mary Doria Russell, biological anthropologist and author of The Sparrow and Doc

“It’s been years since I’ve felt so passionate about a book. When I finished at 3 a.m., I wept, then I woke up the next morning, reread the ending, and cried all over again.”

—Ruth Ozeki, author of My Year of Meats and A Tale for the Time Being

Listen now or Get MP3 44:06 min.






Click here to listen to the entire show. 59:49 min.

Also on this show:
Breastfeeding Awareness Month

April 14, 2014: The German Doctor: An Interview with Lucia Puenzo

THE GERMAN DOCTOR:  Kate Raphael talks with filmmaker and novelist Lucia Puenzo, whose film THE GERMAN DOCTOR (WAKOLDA), adapted from her novel, opens next week.

An article in the New York Times over the weekend talked about something called "slow cognitive tempo," a new form of Attention Deficit Disorder which scientists are studying and doctors are busy diagnosing and medicating in kids.This is really nothing new but the stage is different, jobs are much fewer and it is harder and harder to make one's way in the world.And of course drug companies are always manufacturing new products and finding new uses for old ones to treat these supposed diseases and paying doctors to prescribe them and give out samples, and parents are not encouraged or educated to challenge the wisdom of doctors, and so on and so on.

This overdrugging of kids in order to make them fit into an ever narrowing box of acceptable behavior and capabilities is a form of social engineering that makes it possible for us to do less of the more overt types, but is no less harmful and it raises some tough questions of who is culpable and for what.  It's easy to say that the people who design experiments on developmentally disabled people are evil.  But I think most parents who give their kids Ritalin so they can do better in school and stop getting in trouble are really trying to do right by their kids.  And most of the doctors who prescribe these drugs, and the scientists who research these supposed disorders, are also trying to help.

These are some of the questions at the heart of the new film by Argentine director Lucia Puenzo.  The film is called in English THE GERMAN DOCTOR, and it opens on April 25 at the Embarcadero and the Albany Twin.  It deals with the time that Josef Mengele spent in Argentina after the war.  Lucia Puenzo is the author of five novels and the director of two previous films,  Her debutfilm, XXY, won numerous awards including the Critics' Week grand prize at the 2007 Cannes film festival.  The German Doctor is based on her novel, WAKOLDA, which is also the name of the film in Spanish.

Listen now:





or Get MP3 13:20 min.

Click to hear entire show. 59:50 min.

Also on today's show:

Tara Dorabji talks with Shailja Patel, whose one-woman show Migritude, is now a book published by Kaya Press, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this week with a reading at City Lights.

Filmmaker and activist Tracey Quezada talks about what's wrong with the criminal justice approach to child sexual assault and what we can do to address this public health problem as a community.

October 28, 2013 - Geeky Women, Ex-Nuns and Iranian American Theater

Why Don't U.S. Women Choose Science Careers?

Eileen Pollack was one of the first two women to receive a bachelors in Physics from Yale, but ended up teaching creative writing instead of going on in science. In this interview, Ms. Pollack talks about what happened to her, and why the numbers of U.S. women in math and science have changed very little in the last thirty years.  Ms. Pollack is author of the novels BREAKING AND ENTERING and PARADISE, NEW YORK. She recently wrote a piece for the New York Times entitled "Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?"

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"444 Days" from Z Below

Golden Thread Productions, recognized as the leading Middle Eastern Theater in the country, opens its fall season with "444 Days." "444 Days" is artistic Torange Yeghiezarian's first full-length play to be staged in 15 years. It explores the relationship between a former American hostage in Iran, and one of his captors, who has come to the Bay Area 25 years later to seek treatment for her critically ill daughter. It has received excellent reviews in local press. Torange Yeghiezarian talks with Kate Raphael about how she wrote the play and what she hopes to accomplish.




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Find out how you can get tickets for "444 Days."

Being Out of Order, or How Feminism Rocked the Convent

Carole Ganim and Lucienne O'Keefe spent 38 years between them in an Ursuline convent in the 1950s and 60s. They were very happy there, yet by the early seventies, they, like so many other women, had left their order. In this interview they discuss why they grew restless with the idyllic life of the convent, and how they see the future of the Catholic church.  Ganim is author of the book BEING OUT OF ORDER: THE PROPHETIC GENERATION OF NUNS AND SISTERS. 

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