Girls And Women

Kelly Heier dreams of playing college basketball, but the 12-year-old has never been to a college women's game.As a youngster, Dana Bollinger never attended a women's college game either, but she is living Heier's dream at Goucher College.Tomorrow, Bollinger and her Gophers teammates will introduce Kelly and her Fallston travel teammates to women's college basketball as part of Goucher's commemoration of the 12th National Girls and Women in Sports Day. Kelly's team will scrimmage Towson's 11-12 travel team as a prelude to the Gophers' 2 p.m. game against Marymount.

Great numbers of girls and women suffer from the impacts of a negative body image, including, for example, health concerns such as eating disorders. The National Institute of Mental Health, referring to the results of the National Comorbidity Study - Adolescent Supplement, cites that approximately 2.7 percent of 13-to-18-year-olds, suffer from anorexia, bulimia and binge-eating. Based on the U.S. 2010 Census, approximately 6,300 Maryland adolescent girls are estimated to suffer from eating disorders.

When it comes to what the therapists call "body image," Marissa Massey doesn't seem to need much bucking up. Before the question was even asked, the inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women had a ready answer: "I love my body. I do." If everyone had that much confidence, Saturday's event at the prison in Jessup might not have been considered necessary. Representatives of the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt and the Girl Scouts set up shop at the prison yesterday to continue their campaign to resist what is considered a pervasive cultural obsession with an ideal body type, usually thin and thinner.

April is Financial Literacy Month. Imagine how different the economic meltdown might have been if every school-aged child were taught some basic economic skills, from learning how to earn, save and budget to investing and donating money. Financial literacy is the intellectual raw material for crafting goals and shaping strategies in the new global economy. It's like learning another language, putting a "D" for "dollars" into the ABCs of education. Twenty years ago the term "financial literacy" was barely in the lexicon.

Great numbers of girls and women suffer from the impacts of a negative body image, including, for example, health concerns such as eating disorders. The National Institute of Mental Health, referring to the results of the National Comorbidity Study - Adolescent Supplement, cites that approximately 2.7 percent of 13-to-18-year-olds, suffer from anorexia, bulimia and binge-eating. Based on the U.S. 2010 Census, approximately 6,300 Maryland adolescent girls are estimated to suffer from eating disorders.

For a record-setting nine years, national and international gold medalist Wendy Hilliard had represented the United States in rhythmic gymnastics.Yet when Hilliard went looking for financial support during her final year of competition in 1988, she found no interest. That's when Hilliard got her introduction to the Women's Sports Foundation.The foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and enhancing the sports and fitness experience for girls and women, bestowed its travel and training grant upon Hilliard.

When Jenny Slingluff set out to recruit players for the first North Carolina women's varsity lacrosse team, she headed straight for Baltimore.With no high school girls lacrosse anywhere near Chapel Hill, the Tar Heels coach and Roland Park graduate knew exactly where to find athletes with well-developed skills. She now has 13 Baltimore-area women on her roster, including 10 on scholarship, as the Tar Heels head into their second varsity season.Slingluff is not the only college coach scouring the Baltimore area for players.

With human papillomavirus, girls and women have been getting all the attention. Parents across the United States have rushed to have their daughters vaccinated against the virus. States are wrestling with whether to require adolescents be vaccinated. And recent research found that HPV infection rates among girls and women are higher than previously thought - more than one-quarter of females ages 14 to 59. Now the attention is turning to boys and men. As many as 60 percent of men ages 18 to 70 are infected with HPV, according to data not yet published, raising the question of whether the new vaccine will be effective unless men, not just women, are immunized.

WASHINGTON -- Nushawn Williams was despicably criminal in having unprotected sex with dozens of New York state girls and women after he knew that he was infected with the deadly AIDS virus. He was a devout criminal who apparently hung out near the high school in Mayville, N.Y., seducing many female students who would give him sex for drugs. And, after he drifted into New York City, this 20-year-old was able to charm dozens of adult females into having sex with him.At latest count, health officials had identified at least 28 girls and women who had had sexual intercourse with Mr. Williams, some of whom are now infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

The Maryland Women's Heritage Center, one of Baltimore's newest attractions, will open to the public next month. In the planning stage for three decades, the heritage center tells stories of achievement by women who have been inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame as well as "unsung heroines" who shaped Maryland families and communities. It is an outgrowth of the Maryland Women's History Project, which began in 1980 as a collaborative venture between the Maryland Commission for Women and the Maryland State Department of Education.

The Maryland Women's Heritage Center, one of Baltimore's newest attractions, will open to the public next month. In the planning stage for three decades, the heritage center tells stories of achievement by women who have been inducted into the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame as well as "unsung heroines" who shaped Maryland families and communities. It is an outgrowth of the Maryland Women's History Project, which began in 1980 as a collaborative venture between the Maryland Commission for Women and the Maryland State Department of Education.

When it comes to what the therapists call "body image," Marissa Massey doesn't seem to need much bucking up. Before the question was even asked, the inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women had a ready answer: "I love my body. I do." If everyone had that much confidence, Saturday's event at the prison in Jessup might not have been considered necessary. Representatives of the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt and the Girl Scouts set up shop at the prison yesterday to continue their campaign to resist what is considered a pervasive cultural obsession with an ideal body type, usually thin and thinner.

Get a look at the new face of veganism. The mousy hippie chick who couldn't imagine eating a brown-eyed baby cow any more than she could imagine eating the family pet has grown up. She's a sexy, sassy babe with a smart-aleck attitude about the food choices you are making. Fashion has met food, and the work of a couple of escapees from the world of modeling has put veganism on the runway, creating a perceptible bump in the fastest-growing food trend among girls and young women. Credit for the new look of veganism goes to Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, authors of Skinny Bitch, "a no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous," and a new companion cookbook, Skinny Bitch in the Kitch.

With human papillomavirus, girls and women have been getting all the attention. Parents across the United States have rushed to have their daughters vaccinated against the virus. States are wrestling with whether to require adolescents be vaccinated. And recent research found that HPV infection rates among girls and women are higher than previously thought - more than one-quarter of females ages 14 to 59. Now the attention is turning to boys and men. As many as 60 percent of men ages 18 to 70 are infected with HPV, according to data not yet published, raising the question of whether the new vaccine will be effective unless men, not just women, are immunized.

ATHENS - As a girl playing youth soccer in New Brunswick, N.J., Heather O'Reilly had a poster of Mia Hamm on her bedroom wall. On Monday night on the island of Crete, O'Reilly, 19, scored the winning goal in overtime after receiving a crossing pass from Hamm, 32, as the U.S. women's Olympic soccer team beat Germany, 2-1, to earn a berth in tonight's gold-medal match against Brazil. For soccer aficionados, the pass was important because of its impact on the game. For supporters of women's sports in the United States, it was even more significant as a symbolic passing of the torch from one generation of highly regarded athletes to another.

THERE'S MIXED news about the status of girls and women in science and math. Females have made significant progress during the past 20 years in medicine and the biological sciences. But the gender gap hasn't closed in technology and engineering, and in computer science it has widened. These are among the findings of a report issued yesterday by the National Council for Research on Women. Among the report's lowlights: In 1996, women constituted 45 percent of the work force in the United States but held only 12 percent of science and engineering jobs in business and industry - this at a time when U.S. firms couldn't fill technically advanced jobs.

BY NOW, the benefits of single-sex education for girls and women have been reported so often and so fully that you might think the advocates of women's institutions could snap their briefcases shut and declare the case closed.But we can't.It isn't enough to cite the familiar statistics showing that graduates of women's colleges succeed in traditionally male fields -- business, government, academia -- far out of proportion to their numbers in the population.Unless we understand the reasons for the success of single-sex education for girls and women, we risk missing some important lessons about education, society and the sexes today.

A baseball player is more likely to remember his first glove than his first kiss.The almost spiritual trip to the sporting goods store with his father to buy it. The awkward first game of catch with the new, stiff leather. The soaking, the oiling, the rubbing -- the ritual of molding the glove to his hand, forming the pocket that will trap the ball with a solid "pop." The intimacy of his relationship with that glove -- it is part of him. On his worst day, it will catch the ball for him.Imagine, then, what it is like for the little girl whose first glove is the one her brother has outgrown.

JUST WHEN San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Jane Gottesman must have been putting the finishing touches on a seven-year mission to collect the rare photographs of women playing sports, Brandi Chastain took her shirt off. That act of uninhibited joy, which punctuated the 1999 World Cup victory of the American women's team, had been practiced by victorious male athletes forever. But the fact that a woman did it changed the nature of the conversation about women and sports. Thanks to Title IX, girls and women have been given more and varied opportunities to play sports for almost 30 years.

Five years after a watershed conference in Beijing articulated what more than 180 nations agreed were universal rights of women, a weeklong follow-up meeting ended yesterday at the United Nations with no significant victories for opponents who have tried to reverse those gains. An all-night session Friday into yesterday, capping a week of heated arguments, preserved a variety of women's rights, including the most contentious, that "women have the right to decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality" and should be able to do so without "coercion, discrimination and violence."