A friend recently wrote, “Heads up for an article I thought you might like to read that gets the feministy juices flowing. Its on Salon.com today, entitled Making Women’s Issues go Away by Rebecca Traister.” Here’s an excerpt of the article:

If you’d logged onto the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau Web site in 1999, you would have found a list of more than 25 fact sheets and statistical reports on topics ranging from “Earning Differences Between Men and Women” to “Facts About Asian American and Pacific Islander Women” to “Women’s Earnings as Percent of Men’s 1979-1997.”

Not anymore. Those fact sheets no longer exist on the Women’s Bureau Web site, and have instead been replaced with a handful of peppier titles, like “Hot Jobs for the 21st Century” and “20 Leading Occupations for Women.” It’s just one example of the ways in which the Bush administration is dismantling or distorting information on women’s issues, from pay equity to reproductive healthcare, according to “Missing: Information About Women’s Lives,” a new report released Wednesday by the National Council for Research on Women.

My friend continued by saying, “I personally do not like hearing all the statistics as of late of how single woman are one of the largest groups of non-voting peoples and then the commentary that follows on why ‘we’ don’t vote. Of course this ‘we’ is a very heterogenous bunch — but it still irks me, and I’d like to see more done about it.” She mentioned a site focused on trying to bring together large numbers of people to encourage them to vote. It is Dinner for America, which “represents 30 million young people who are trying to make sense of the baffling, absurd, and hilarious world of American politics.”