Links from Our Group Chat: Midterms Results, RBG, Tampon Tax & More!
The past couple weeks we’ve been texting our friends to get them to vote. 300 women’s names made it on ballots this year, and 117 of them won during the Midterms. More than 40 of those women were WOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar became the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. This is just the first page of a new chapter for women, every vote matters.
We’re fond of Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, Katie Couric, and more this week. This group of leading ladies in entertainment talked with Forbes the other night with the greatest sense of urgency in making the push for more women in the media industries. Reasons for this change include a different perspective, improvements in democracy, and most definitely, increased diversity in the media industry. As Katie Couric said, “Media should reflect America, and we're a huge diverse patchwork of people in this country with different life experiences, different perspectives and with differences economically, geographically, ethnically, religiously. We have different races, different genders, different gender identification. So I think that in order to tell the story of America, you have to let all Americans be the storytellers.”
The 307th shooting this year took place Wednesday night in Thousand Oaks, CA killing 12 people at a bar holding an event for college students. The shooter has been identified as Ian David Long and was found dead that same evening. However, celebrities have been reacting on Twitter, including Tamera Mowry-Housely whose niece was killed that evening. In response to this great tragedy, Chelsea Clinton reminded us that this was the 311th day of the year, making it even clearer that gun control is absolutely necessary.
OMG, RBG! Eighty-five-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg fractured three ribs in a fall in her office at the court and is in the hospital, the court said Thursday. She was supposed to participate in a ceremony Thursday welcoming new Justice Brett Kavanaugh and has no plans to retire anytime soon. However, it’s been reported that she has left the hospital and is currently recovering.
Propositions this election ranged from rent control to dialysis but this one in particular had the best flow (pun intended). Among the initiatives that scored a resounding win: elimination of the “tampon tax” in Nevada (a.k.a. State Question No. 2). Nevada is now the 10th state to exempt menstrual products from sales tax — joining states including Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, and New York, as well as Washington, D.C.
By: Ashley Banayan
Ashley Banayan is a senior at the University of Southern California pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Public Relations from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism with a minor in Web Technologies and Applications from the Viterbi School of Engineering. Currently, she works as an editorial intern for Create and Cultivate. She has experience in traditional public relations, social media marketing, influencer relations, content creation, and web development. Furthermore, she is the founder of Geocasion, a company designing Snapchat Geofilters for both businesses and personal clients, garnering 4.5 million views. In turn, these experiences led her to focus on the convergence and disruption in media, communication and web technologies.