Minorities Women

The setting was simple, the talk was plain, the warm hospitality was quintessentially black, female and culturally Southern--despite the Los Angeles location--and the food was catered by an outfit known as the Ghetto Gourmet. The women from Japan seemed to love it. But there were tense moments at the start. "Is Japan really anti-racist?" demanded a reporter for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the largest black-owned newspaper in the West.

Minority and women writers have made modest job gains in the television industry but have a long way to go before the playing field is level. So concludes the latest analysis from the Writers Guild of America, West, which reviewed employment patterns for 1,722 writers working on 190 broadcast and cable television shows during the 2011-2012 season.  The study focuses on three groups that have traditionally been underemployed in the TV industry:...

Flushed with excitement over the Pathfinder mission to Mars, Linda Robek Furman took a break from her job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on Wednesday to talk about the historic mission with an all-female classroom of 10th and 11th graders and encourage them to pursue careers in science and mathematics.

WASHINGTON - Come January, women will hold 20 of the 100 seats in the Senate, the largest number in history, and white males will probably no longer be a majority in the House Democratic caucus. Those shifts reflect the growing electoral power of women and minorities, and the Democratic Party's determination to harness that energy to build a diverse coalition. The gains made by women in the Senate were the first achievement noted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada when he discussed the election results at a news conference Wednesday.

Actresses Lisa Lord, Hattie Winston and Liz Torres will lead a panel at Cal State Northridge today titled "Creativity, Casting and Critics--Women of Color Confront Industry Images." Lord, who is part Chinese, is a cast member of the ABC soap opera "Port Charles" and has appeared in the television series "ER" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." Wilson, an African American, had a role in the movie "Jackie Brown" and will be appearing in the upcoming Disney movie "Meet the Deedles."

Dr. Mae C. Jemison of West Los Angeles, the first black woman to be selected for the nation's astronaut corps, says she wants to be known as "just another astronaut," but that if she becomes a role model for other black women aspiring to join the nation's space agency, that's OK too. Jemison, 30, was named on Friday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to join 14 other individuals in the first class of astronaut trainees chosen by the space agency since the Jan.

Lenora Terrance has spent considerable time worrying about her oldest daughter's senior prom. She thinks about what type of dress 16-year-old Misty will wear next year, questions just how it will fit and envisions the perfect hairstyle for that special night. But most of all, she worries whether her daughter will even have a date.

The black NASCAR truck with a white "54" on the side gleamed on pit road as its driver walked up for the night's race, prompting three dozen photographers and well-wishers to edge closer. The attraction was 19-year-old Darrell Wallace Jr. As Wallace posed for the cameras at Daytona International Speedway, the public address announcer called out his name and added: "That's a driver many people are waiting to see. " Indeed they are - especially the executives who run NASCAR - because Wallace is an African American.

Minority and low-income women in Los Angeles County are more likely to have limited access to healthcare and to struggle with chronic diseases, according to a new report by the county Department of Public Health. The report, "Health Indicators for Women in Los Angeles County," was released last week by the Office of Women's Health and the Office of Health Assessment & Epidemiology. Among the findings: African American women were far more likely to suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, and to die from chronic illnesses.

As the black owner of a small accounting firm, Deborah Morrisette could not compete for a financial services contract at the city-funded Crenshaw Shopping Plaza in South-Central Los Angeles. Although she ran her own company for the last decade, the 1988 bid required at least five years of experience in the specialized field of mall financing, she said.

WASHINGTON - Even more than the election that made Barack Obama the first black president, the one that returned him to office sent an unmistakable signal that the hegemony of the straight white male in America is over. The long drive for broader social participation by all Americans reached a turning point in the 2012 election, which is likely to go down as a watershed in the nation's social and political evolution - and not just because in some states voters approved of same-sex marriage for the first time.

The script hasn't changed much for the diversity -- or lack thereof -- of writers in Hollywood. That's the log line from the 2011 Hollywood Writers Report, the latest study by the Writers Guild of America, West on the career status of film and TV writers. The study tracks employment and earnings by ethnicity, gender and age for writers between 2008 and 2009. Among the key findings: Though the share of minorities working in television -- 10% -- rebounded to 2005 levels, the earnings gap between minorities and white writers more than doubled since 2007.

Local minority businesses are pushing for reforms they say will get more of the Los Angeles city government's $1.1 billion in annual contracts into the hands of such firms and those owned by women and service-disabled military veterans. A report advocating the reforms "The Case for Minority Business Contracting Reform in the City of Los Angeles," was released Oct. 19 by the Greater Los Angeles African American Chamber of Commerce. It argued that the proposals would contribute to the city's overall economic recovery.

The recently enacted financial reform legislation tries in numerous ways to change how Wall Street companies and their federal regulators act, but a little-noticed provision aims for something potentially more difficult and controversial — altering how they look. To promote diversity in the largely white male world, the law requires each of the 30 federal financial agencies and departments, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and all 12 Federal Reserve banks, to establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion.

Minority and low-income women in Los Angeles County are more likely to have limited access to healthcare and to struggle with chronic diseases, according to a new report by the county Department of Public Health. The report, "Health Indicators for Women in Los Angeles County," was released last week by the Office of Women's Health and the Office of Health Assessment & Epidemiology. Among the findings: African American women were far more likely to suffer from sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, and to die from chronic illnesses.

Re "Shrew Versus Shrewd," July 28: While Mary McNamara bemoans the institutional sexism of a film industry that confines white women in lead roles to socially challenged "shrews," she conveniently ignores the egregious institutional racism of an industry that renders women of color virtually invisible. Not one of the actresses that she cites in her comparison of the relative diversity of TV character roles to the wasteland of mainstream film roles is an actress of color. Jim Crow sexism is alive and well at The Times and in Hollywood.

Remember that three-way Democratic contest for secretary of state? If you looked closely, you could see the California of the 21st Century in its top contenders, among them a gay man, an Asian man and a black woman. "If there had only been a Latino (as a major party candidate) in the race, it'd been perfect," said political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe. "It is the constituency of the future."

Large Los Angeles law firms have poor diversity records, with the numbers of female, black, Latino, Asian and gay partners and associates lagging significantly behind their representation in the city's population, according to a study released Wednesday.

Minority women living in Los Angeles County suffer disproportionate rates of chronic disease, according to a study released Wednesday by public health officials that examined the relationship between ethnicity and women's health. Women in general have higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis, asthma and depression than men, the data showed, and minority women are at higher risk for many such ailments.