Michelle Wie blazes on in golf:

On Monday she became the first female to be invited to play on the men’s European Tour; yesterday she became the first female to make it through the first qualifying stages for the men’s US Open event.

The Hawaiian can even claim to be the first female to win a professional men’s tournament as her level-par round of 72 at the Turtle Bay Resort on her home island of Oahu was the best score in the field of 40. It was a nerveless display as only three players went forward to final qualifying in New Jersey on 5 June.

Unsurprisingly she’s ruffling some feathers on the women’s professional tour (where she hasn’t yet won a tournament – but then again she is only 16). But I think she’s on the right track: if she’s going to compete with the men – with those who are the best – she’s got to do it right from the start, and match them all along the way.

And there are an awful lot of stereotypes about
women in sport that she could help to overcome; in Australia, Nadeene Latif, a weightlifter who won a medal at the Commonwealth Games, is finding schools are just not interested in having her visit. Why? She’s a weightlifter.

Latif, a 53 kilogram competitor and as petite as the former gymnast she once was, says it is not the issue of drugs in sport or the individual nature of weightlifting that turns the educators off. Teachers reckon girls do not want to know about weightlifting because they do not want to get big, she says. “The teachers tell me they don’t think the sport is appealing to the students, and that they believe they shouldn’t be doing it because of their physical development at this time [of puberty], but studies show this is when some weight bearing exercise is helpful.

Oddly enough, I think of all sports I might have done, weightlifting is the one that might have suited me best, had I been given the opportunity. I put on muscle very easily, and have a lot of strength in my arms and legs (even if endurance hasn’t ever been my thing). But I can imagine the hysterics that would have caused at my “ladies college”. My suggestion that we play football (soccer) was dismissed out of hand, even though as I pointed out, it was a far less dangerous sport than the hockey which was for some reason considered a proper “girls” game.

Having it all, i.e. a job, family and generally mixed life, is actually good for women’s health. Not a surprise really, for despite our society’s general paranoia about “stress”, I think we all know that, reasonably well managed, being busy, rushing around, and having things to do, is much better than underemployment and a routine life.

While homemakers are hailed by Middle England traditionalists as the proper example of sensible motherhood, research suggests that staying at home and giving up work leads to poorer long-term health. The risk of becoming obese was found to be almost double for a stay-at-home mother.

Then the music industry has traditionally been seen as a male preserve (and professional performance is still overwhelmingly so), but it seems the media has it entirely wrong, and the “MP3 revolution” is being at least equally driven by women as men.

The belief that growth in the market was coming from older male fans sparked a rash of magazines aimed at that niche. But research by the media group Emap shows that the huge popularity of MP3 players such as Apple’s iPod has now fuelled an increase in sales to women.The study also shows that the traditional image of the music press as a male preserve has been shattered. More women than men read the rock magazine Kerrang!, for example, and nearly half of those under 30 who buy the the music monthly Q are female. More women now spend more time listening to music than their male counterparts, with record labels speculating that the rise in digital downloads means they now find it quicker and easier to explore new artists.

Two truly depressing articles:

In Ethopia, girls face being kidnapped and forced into marriage with much older, and very likely HIV-positive, men.

In February, her parents received a letter from another suitor asking to marry Mulu but she refused so the 39-year-old man turned up at the house and kidnapped her with her parents’ consent. “I managed to get my parents to agree for us to be tested for HIV because I had heard about it at school and on the radio. I was negative but my abductor was positive.” Mulu’s parents agreed that she did not have to marry the man.

The one bit of hope in that is the obvious positive effect of education in giving girls and women – at least the really tough, smart ones – tools to protect themselves. (And when you read the story Mulu has to be very tough indeed.)

In Turkey, girls are meanwhile being effectively emotionally blackmailed into committing suicide (and no doubt sometimes straight-out murdered with suicide as a cover for the killers):

Turkey’s southeastern Anatolia … has become notorious in recent years for the high number of suicides, particularly of girls and young women whose despair is said to stem from their severely restricted lives. But women’s groups and human-rights workers believe a more sinister explanation lies behind many of the deaths. They’re convinced a growing number of girls and women are being locked in rooms by their families, with a gun, poison or a noose, and left there until they kill themselves.