Here it is, y’all: Our bittersweet bye-bye-summer-love
Darts & Laurels
When he’s not too busy being a generally unexciting gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Crist is using a grim statistic to liven up what the Miami Herald called a "buzzless" campaign. Crist pointed to a 2013 study that found Florida women make just 83 cents on the dollar that Florida men make. PolitiFact Florida debunked his claim, citing a more recent study that found women actually make a whopping 84 cents on the dollar, as per a study from April. Furthermore, PolitiFact found, the wage gap in Florida has only decreased 1.8 percent since 1990.
A number of often cited factors influence this gap: Discrimination, certainly, but also the discouraging fact that women and men enter different occupations at different rates. This is known as "occupational segregation," i.e. why so many men are software engineers and why so many women are nurses. Both of these fields are changing, of course, as well as others, but — seriously, only 2 percent in a quarter of a century? That’s a nightmare. This week, we’re tossing a get-your-s**t-together-and-pay-ladies-more DART at the dismal Florida pay gap.
The Tampa Bay Times reported this week that early voting in Florida for the primaries is undergoing a serious makeover, with more days and locations and counties. Polls open statewide on Monday, and they’ll remain open until Aug. 24 — and we better see you there! To close out the summer, we’re awarding a pre-emptive LAUREL to everyone taking advantage of the early vote.
More dismal numbers for this week’s darts: Al Jazeera America reports that 10 percent of cancer survivors "gamble with their health" by continuing to smoke tobacco after they’ve been cured. Survivors of bladder cancer smoke the most tobacco, the study found, followed by lung cancer survivors. Bleak, considering the sheer amount of resources available for individuals to quit smoking these days. We have mixed feelings about this one — on one hand, smoking is one of the hardest addictions to overcome, and many survivors do want to quit. But on the other hand, we feel obligated to toss a tough-love DART at the health gamblers who continue to smoke after beating cancer.
And last, but certainly not least, our departing three-semester-veteran opinions editor is handing off a special-edition freedom-of-speech LAUREL to the dedicated community of Alligator online commenters. We won’t drop usernames, but it’d be unfair not to acknowledge the countless minutes you spend telling us what, exactly, is wrong with the Alligator and its writers. A cursory survey of other college newspapers has revealed that the Alligator stands alone in its ability to inspire vitriol in the same handful of anonymous commenters, so we thank ours for standing by us. At the end of the day, it’s not the photographers, writers and editors who are the heroes: It’s the ones who wake up every day, log into a ghost account and call us morons who are the real heroes. Blessings.
Have a great break!
[A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 8/7/2014 under the headline "Darts & Laurels"]
