Welcome to the July 2023 edition of Campus Safety’s “5 Facts!”
“5 Facts,” which runs the last Friday of every month, reviews what Campus Safety has recently covered as well as highlights of some of the quirky, interesting, random information or factoids I come across on practically a daily basis when I’m searching for news.
This month’s edition is about age discrimination against women in the workplace, a recent drop in the U.S. urban murder rate, the causes of extreme heat, and more.
Fact No. 1: Women face age discrimination no matter how old or young they are.
Women in the workplace who want a promotion encounter bias regardless of whether they are young (under 40), middle-aged (40-60) or older (over 60), according to a recent study from the Harvard Business Review.
Ageism is normally understood to be prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination targeting older employees. However, age bias against women appears to occur across the career life cycle.
For younger women or those who look young, they are call pet names and sometimes are mistaken for interns, trainees, or support staff. Some say they’ve even been patted on the head.
Women between the ages of 40 and 60 often can be overlooked because of “too much family responsibility and impending menopause” or they are believed to “be challenging to manage” or they haven’t “aged well.”
Women over the age of 60 are often deemed unworthy of advancement.
Fact No. 2: From May 2022 to May 2023 there was a 12.2% drop in murders in 90 U.S. cities.
Although the U.S. has experienced a significant rise in mass shootings recently, a remarkable number of urban areas have actually experienced a decline in murders over the past year. From May 2022 to May of this year there was a 12.2% reduction in the number of murders in 90 cities… from 3,358 to 2,948.
Murders are down by more than 20% in Los Angeles, Houston, and Philadelphia. Murders have dropped by more than 30% in Jackson, Mississippi; Little Rock, Arkansas; Atlanta, Milwaukee, and several other cities, reports the Guardian.
One expert says the U.S. could be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded.
That being said, there are some cities, such as Memphis and Cleveland, where the murder rate has increased.
Fact No. 3: Pearl Harbor wasn’t the first time Japan sank a U.S. warship.
Although most Americans learned in their history classes about Japan’s devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, that day — December 7, 1941 — wasn’t the first time Japanese warplanes sank a U.S. warship.
The first Japanese sinking of an American warship happened four years earlier on a river in China, reports CNN. The U.S. Navy river gunboat USS Panay and three Standard Oil Company tankers were evacuating American citizens trapped by Japan’s invasion of Nanjing on December 12, 1937. Four people were killed and another 40 servicemen and civilians were injured during the attack.
Fact No. 4: Americans walk less frequently and less safely than citizens in many other nations.
Researchers from Virginia Tech found that Americans generally walk less than individuals who live in many other countries. Americans are also more likely to die when they do walk.
According to the study, which was published in Transport Reviews, the American Journal of Public Health, and TRNews, Americans make fewer than half of the walking trips per day compared to people who live in Britain. Despite walking less, Americans are about six times more likely to be killed while walking per mile traveled.
The study came to similar conclusions when the U.S. was compared with other European countries, such as Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
Pedestrian fatalities in the U.S fell 26% from 1990-2020 but rose 25% from 2010-2020. Compare those figures to the U.K., where pedestrian fatalities dropped 78% from 1990-2020.
Fact No. 5: The current heatwaves happening in North America, Europe, and China are the result of climate change.
July 2023 experienced extreme heatwaves in several parts of the Northern Hemisphere, including the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, Southern Europe, and China.
According to a new study, the unusually strong heatwaves, which are becoming more common, are the result of global warming caused by human activities.
“Without human induced climate change, these heat events would, however, have been extremely rare,” the report said. “In China, it would have been about a 1 in 250-year event, while maximum heat like in July 2023 would have been virtually impossible to occur in the US/Mexico region and Southern Europe if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.”
