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	French Women Strike against Pay Gap by Les Glorieuses, agencies France   November 7, 2016   French women walked off their jobs en masse Monday afternoon, as part of a protest against the pay gap that encouraged them not only to leave early—but to take the rest of the year off.   The strike, organized in part by the feminist publication Les Glorieuses, is calling attention to the fact that France''s gender wage gap means women are effectively working for free starting at 4:34pm local time until the end of the year.   "As of 4:34pm [and 7 seconds] on November 7, women will be working ''voluntarily," the group stated on its website Monday, also noting that women are expected to do additional unpaid work like household chores.   "We call on women, men, unions, and feminist organizations to join the movement… and to hold events and protests in order to make income inequality a central political problem. By tackling this subject, we''re showing that the gender pay gap is not just a ''woman’s issue''."   According to various analyses by the European Union''s statistics agency Eurostat, women are paid 15 to 20 percent less than men, and about 9 percent less when in the same job. Roughly 48 percent of the workforce, just under 13 million people are women.   Other groups behind the strike included Les Effrontées and Osez le Féminisme. The organizers said they were following the lead of Icelandic women who staged a similar walkout last month, although that demonstration ended the same day.   Two days after the Icelandic protest, the World Economic Forum released a report which found that at the rate most countries are taking to close their wage gaps, the global disparity won''t disappear for another 170 years. Other recent reports have made similar conclusions. And the disparity is only "the tip of the iceberg," Osez le Féminisme said, noting that eight in 10 temporary workers in France were also women.   "We make up around 52 percent of the overall population," Les Glorieuses said on its website. "We don''t want to wait until 2186 for equal salaries. We don''t want to wait 170 years for this parity."   French women''s rights minister Laurence Rossignol said she supported Monday''s action, telling Le Parisien, "When women protest, they make visible what is invisible."   French education minister Najat Belkacem, who previously served in Rossignol''s position, also publicly supported the action tweeting, "The fight for pay equality involves the whole of society. We cannot wait until 2186!"   * March 2017: Global Equal Pay Coalition: Launch of Platform of Equal pay Champions at UN live broadcast: http://bit.ly/2mlQxSW Visit the related web page
	Breast cancer deaths may double by 2030, reports say by PBS NewsHour, The Lancet   November 2016   Cancer deaths among women are expected to climb 60 percent by 2030, due to an uptick in breast and cervical cancer cases, according to a series of reports published this week.   The number of women killed by breast cancer could nearly double to 3.2 million by 2030, said one of three reports published in the Lancet medical journal. Cervical cancer diagnoses are expected to increase 25 percent in the same time frame.   “We have not been paying attention to the burden of cancer in terms of women’s health. It’s really much higher than we had thought it was,” Sally Cowal, senior VP of global health at ACS, told PBS NewsHour.   Cancer would become the second leading cause of mortality in women, if these predictions come to pass, according to a separate American Cancer Society report published Tuesday. The ACS estimates cancer may be responsible for one in seven deaths among women by 2030.   Where and how a woman lives also has a large effect on developing cancer, early prognosis and access to treatment. The Lancet series spotlights how low-income nations might shoulder much of the rising disease burden, citing 2012 sources that show 14.1 million new cases worldwide with 8.2 million deaths, 65 percent of those deaths were from “less developed regions.”   Researchers point to poor diets, being overweight and limited access to cancer prevention as key factors that contribute to high cancer risk for women in low- and middle-class households. Cervical cancer, for example, can largely be prevented with low-cost HPV vaccines. One of the Lancet studies stated 85 percent of women diagnosed with cervical cancer and 87 percent killed by the disease live in low- and middle-income countries.   “Cancer has not been thought to be a problem really in the developing world,” Cowal said. Now, she said, that is exactly where researchers are seeing cancer diagnoses rise the fastest. http://to.pbs.org/2e3vuFg http://bit.ly/2fdTCkT Visit the related web page
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