In a Scattered Protest, Saudi Women Take the Wheel

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

From its inception in April, the protest against the longstanding ban was far smaller than initially anticipated, but it was not meant to be a mass driving effort. Rather, women with legal driver’s licenses from other countries were urged to run mundane errands — going to the grocery store, perhaps — in order to underscore the fact that it should be normal for women to drive.

Maha al-Qahtani, an information technology specialist for the government, drove around the capital, Riyadh, for 45 minutes with her husband, Mohamed, a human rights activist, in the car. She braced for a siren after passing each of about five police cars, she said, but they ignored her.

“I woke up today believing with every part of me that this is my right, I woke up believing this is my duty, and I was no longer afraid,” said Mrs. Qahtani, adding that she had brought a change of clothes and a prayer rug with her in case she was detained.

Manal al-Sharif, a 32-year-old single mother, started the call for the June 17 protest in April with a Facebook page. But after posting videos of herself driving around Al Khobar in the Eastern Province, she was arrested in late May and jailed for nine days — a punishment that was stricter than expected. Many supporters were disappointed, feeling that she had jumped the gun and jeopardized them all by taking a confrontational approach.

Women driving remains a sensitive issue in Saudi Arabia. For religious conservatives, it is a kind of Alamo, with the ban a sign that the kingdom still holds to its traditions and has not caved to Western pressure.

The ruling family has been especially dependent on this base of supporters in recent months as protests erupted across the region and has been mute as the mufti, the highest religious figure in the kingdom, rolled out a fatwa banning protests.

Many Saudi activists considered the treatment meted out to Ms. Sharif a warning from the monarchy against trying to organize any kind of movement via social media. The initiative for women to drive was the strongest effort so far in the kingdom inspired by the regional climate.

“Women in Saudi Arabia see other women in the Middle East making revolutions, women in Yemen and Egypt at the forefront of revolutions, being so bold, toppling entire governments,” said Waleed Abu Alkhair, whose wife drove around Jidda. “The women of Saudi Arabia looked at themselves and they realized, ‘Wow! We can’t even drive!’?”

Mr. Abu Alkhair said he knew about many women who drove, and aside from one being questioned by the police for two hours, none were bothered. Once the campaign had been announced there were frequent threats by opponents to punish female drivers either by beating them or by smashing their cars.

“We want women to keep fighting this fight and to be free,” he said. “It will help to liberate the entire society.”

In the weeks after Ms. Sharif’s arrest, a debate erupted between conservative clerics and their followers and the kingdom’s increasingly outspoken women. Opponents largely argued that Saudi society was not ready, that a woman should not be thrown into the wilds of Saudi driving habits or be held responsible for any accidents.

Worse, opponents argued, it would lead to the public mingling of the sexes. Supporters mocked the clerics for putting everything in a sexual context and asked why it was O.K. for Saudi women to be driven around by an army of some 800,000 male drivers imported from Southeast Asia.

Although the arrest of Ms. Sharif discouraged women from driving, the fact that it enlivened the debate was in contrast to the first (and last) such protest in November 1990. Clerics branded the 47 women amoral and the royal family confiscated their passports, firing those working for the government. Many went into isolation for their own safety.

In addition to religious opposition there is widespread suspicion in the country that those who control the visa process — and in Saudi Arabia that means the princes of the ruling family — have made a business out of controlling the black market in visas for drivers, which can cost more than $3,000 apiece.

Many young married women decry the fact that they cannot afford that, not to mention the driver’s salary, about $600 a month.

The more liberal princes support allowing women to drive.

Prince Talal bin Abdul-Aziz al-Saud, 79 years old and long among the most outspoken members of the royal family, argues that such reforms lag because the leading members of the family have failed to yield any power or influence to younger generations.

“Bravo to the women!” the prince said in an interview. “Why should women drive in the countryside and not in the cities?” (Women have long driven in rural areas.)

King Abdullah and other royals have said in interviews with foreign reporters that they expected Saudi women to drive one day soon but have done little lately.

“Saudi Arabian women are going to have to fight for our rights, men are not going to just hand them over to us,” said Amira Kashgary, a professor who drove through Jidda on Friday for 45 minutes with her 21-year-old daughter. Women are tired of being stranded or missing appointments because their drivers disappear for the day, Professor Kashgary said. “We want to drive today, tomorrow, and every day — it’s not a one-day show. We want to make it a norm.”

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The Female Factor: In Philippine Newsrooms, the Women Rule

The watershed came in the last few years of the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled for nearly two decades and was toppled in a popular revolt in 1986. When Mr. Marcos imposed martial law in 1972, many of the mostly male editors and reporters who were critical of him were imprisoned or went underground to join the resistance. The men who remained in the newsrooms were often co-opted by the government or operated clandestinely to put out opposition publications.

Into the breach came the women, who up to then had been largely sidelined in feature supplements or less consequential jobs. For the first time, they took over key positions in news organizations. In several instances, they directly challenged the government with reports and commentaries that contributed to the groundswell of opposition against Mr. Marcos.

Today, these women and the ones they hired and promoted dominate the country’s largest broadcast networks, its most influential newspapers and magazines, and investigative journalism nonprofit organizations.

“You cannot explain the rise of the women journalists without talking about martial law,” said Inday Espina-Varona, a journalist since the Marcos era who now runs the citizen-journalism program of ABS-CBN, the country’s largest broadcast network. “When the men were struggling back into journalism, the women were already there.”

The Marcos dictatorship had a “radicalizing effect” on many women in the Philippines, especially journalists, Belinda A. Aquino, a historian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wrote in the 1994 book “Women and Politics Worldwide.”

Lourdes Molina-Fernandez, managing editor of the Web site Interaksyon and the former editor in chief of Business Mirror, a Manila paper, said: “That period a few years right before Marcos fell — that was the time when women gained ascendancy in the newsroom because of the sheer preponderance of women writing very critical articles against the dictatorship.” She herself was fresh out of college at the height of the dictatorship and worked for anti-Marcos and leftist publications.

To be sure, women in the Philippines had advanced faster than their counterparts elsewhere in Southeast Asia, one reason perhaps that the U.N. Global Gender Gap Report last year called the Philippines a model for the region. Women were represented in the Senate before World War II, for instance, and many schools were run by women.

But somehow this was not reflected in newsrooms during these periods, said Luis V. Teodoro, a professor at the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. While there had certainly been some female journalists, the Filipino newsroom was dominated by men well into the Marcos years, he said.

The women who have since taken over advanced under the most arduous circumstances, when censorship was widespread and journalists were routinely arrested and tortured, a trial by fire that may have contributed to the assertiveness of the women-led news organizations to this day.

“It took a woman to test the limits of press censorship under Marcos,” said Ms. Aquino, the historian (and no relation to President Benigno S. Aquino III).

That woman was Maria Ceres Doyo, a human rights advocate who in 1980 wrote an article about a tribal chieftain, Macli-ing Dulag, who led his people in resisting a dam project and was killed by the military.

“Nobody was writing about it, so I wrote it, took my own pictures and sent it to the editor of Panorama, whom I did not know,” Ms. Doyo said. In hindsight, she said, “Maybe I was half stupid or half brave.”

View the original article here

Middle East: Women Still an Untapped Labor Force in Turkey

 

ISTANBUL — Until she gave birth to her first child three months ago, 29-year-old Gulsen Cigdem worked at TransOrient International Forwarding, handling sales and logistics for moving goods by air, truck and sea.

Now, her days are spent caring for her son, Doruk, while she and her husband, Tarik, who works in the technology sector, try to find an affordable baby sitter so she can return to work when her maternity leave expires. She wants to avoid becoming one of the hundreds of thousands of Turkish women who, armed with a university degree, find a well-paying and interesting job but do not return to the work force once they marry or start a family.

“I got an education,” Mrs. Cigdem said during a recent interview. “I worked hard for that, and to just drop it because I became a mother is not my style.”

Creating more economic opportunities for women like Mrs. Cigdem is among the goals of the 2011 Global Summit of Women meeting through Saturday in Istanbul as a sort of Davos for women, mirroring the annual gathering of world economic leaders at the Swiss resort. Held for the first time in Turkey, the conference is taking place in a country where women, once they find jobs, often struggle to stay in them.

Researchers say that nearly half of all Turkish women enter the labor market at some point in their lives, but most end up quitting because of family obligations or poor working conditions. Raising rates of employment by women is “instrumental in building capacity for economic growth and poverty reduction,” a report by the Turkish State Planning Organization and the World Bank said.

While 64 percent of adult women in the European Union were employed in 2007, the figure was 23.5 percent in Turkey as of 2009, according to the Turkish and World Bank report. Of the women employed in Turkey in 2008, 35 percent worked in the service sector, 13 percent in industry and 49 percent in agriculture, according to the International Labor Organization.

Part of the problem is that most of the Turkish women who migrate to larger cities like Istanbul from rural areas in the south and east lack sufficient education to find anything but marginal, low-paying jobs. They are also likely to have several children and to find work that is outside the bounds of legal employment and therefore also outside the national social security system, making them more dependent on their spouses.

But it is marriage itself, some studies say, that appears to be the main factor in whether a Turkish woman stays on the job, regardless of her level of education.

“A common explanation suggested for Turkey’s low level of female participation in the labor force is that cultural attitudes that do not approve of women’s presence in the public sphere,” Ipek Ilkkaracan, a professor of economics at Istanbul Technical University, said during an interview by e-mail this week. “But a close look at data does not confirm that. Prior to marriage, women’s participation in the labor market in Turkey is at very high levels.”

Among never-married women age 25 to 45, the rate of participation in the labor force for university graduates is about 90 percent, the same as their male counterparts, Ms. Ilkkaracan said. For never-married women who graduated from high school, the figures are about 55 percent and for primary school graduates, 40 percent.

“By contrast, the figures for married women in Turkey are substantially lower,” she said. “Seventy percent for university graduates, about 25 percent for high school graduates and only 15 percent for married women of prime working age with primary school education.”

“In other words,” she added, “Turkish women participate in large numbers — no matter what their level of education — prior to marriage, but end up leaving their jobs upon marriage and having children.”

Ms. Ilkkaracan, a founding member of the nonprofit Women for Women’s Human Rights and the author of “Toward Gender Equality in the Labor Market: Work and Family Life Reconciliation Policies,” said one reason for the flight was the lack of childcare solutions for working women.

“There are hardly any subsidized childcare centers, crèches or preschools,” she said. “The few that existed have been closed down under the current administration. Given the low wages for women with high school or primary school education, it is hard for them to afford paid childcare.”

The problem is not lost on many of the high-ranking women executives in Turkey, where 12 percent of chief executive positions are held by women, about the same as in Germany according to the World Economic Forum.

Umit Boyner, president of the Turkish Industry and Business Association, or Tusiad, told a conference on working women earlier this year, “We must focus on altering the status of women in education and labor force statistics.”

“I regard the lack of educated women able to take their place in working life of their own free will as a serious loss,” she said. “Let us not squander our resources.”

Guler Sabanci, chairwoman of Sabanci Holding, who ranked third last year in a Financial Times list of the 50 most prominent businesswomen in the world, spoke at the same conference. (She became the first female member of Tusiad in 1984 and for many years was its only female member.)

After hailing the advances made by Turkish women in the era of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Ms. Sabanci said “the present situation is unfortunately not very bright” in terms of women in the work place. “There is still a lot to be done for women in employment, social and political issues.”

“There is an election process ahead of us,” she said, referring to elections set for June. “Our political parties need to show sensitivity in this matter.”

Of the 550 members in the Turkish Parliament, 48 are women.

But for those like Mrs. Cigdem, the new mother, such lofty goals are a distant concern. She is more focused on finding a way to return to work by the end of this year.

“I am entitled to four months of paid leave,” she said by telephone. “Then I can take another six months unpaid. After that I have to go back to my job, or lose it.”

“Some of my friends are even saying that it’s the husband who has to work and that I should just stay home with the baby,” Mrs. Cigdem said. “But I used to live in England where I worked as an au pair. I saw that all the women went back to work after having children, but in Turkey we don’t have an au pair system.”

“I want to work because one income is not enough: Istanbul is very expensive,” she said, “but it’s also important for me socially, because these days I’m just home, home, home, looking after the child. I want to work, first for myself and second to earn enough money to provide a good education for Doruk.”

 

Indiana Bill Cuts Funds for Clinics for Women

Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana said Friday that he would sign a bill cutting off Medicaid financing for Planned Parenthood, a move that lawmakers in several states have begun pondering as a new approach in the battle over abortion. Indiana becomes the first state to go forward.

Abortion rights supporters condemned the decision, saying it would leave 22,000 poor residents of Indiana, who use Planned Parenthood’s 28 health facilities in the state, with nowhere to go for a range of women’s services, from breast cancer screening to birth control. Planned Parenthood of Indiana said it would file an injunction to block the measure from taking effect. But abortion opponents said the move merely guarded against sending tax dollars to facilities that perform abortions, and said women on Medicaid still had plenty of health facilities available to them all over Indiana.

“Any organization affected by this provision can resume receiving taxpayer dollars immediately by ceasing or separating its operations that perform abortions,” Mr. Daniels said in a statement. Federal law prohibits Medicaid money from being used to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, a threat to the life of a mother or incest. Planned Parenthood says Medicaid dollars go toward paying for items like annual exams, birth control and breast cancer screening.

Indiana’s bill comes as Mr. Daniels, a Republican in a state where Republicans last fall gained control of both chambers of the legislature, is expected to announce a decision soon about running for president in 2012.

The bill cutting off an expected $2 million in Medicaid financing to Planned Parenthood could have become law without the governor’s signature, and Mr. Daniels’s announcement was viewed by some as a sign that he may be leaning toward running and hoping to increase his appeal among social conservatives. Some critics of the bill, who lobbied the governor to veto it, said they were surprised he had turned his attention to abortion when he had, of late, focused firmly on matters of the state’s finances and education, including vouchers for private or parochial school tuition.

“Clearly, Governor Daniels would rather play politics with women’s health than show leadership and fiscal responsibility in rejecting a bill that will ultimately cost the state millions in federal funding,” said Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Indiana’s bill includes other provisions aimed at limiting abortion. Among them: a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in most cases rather than an earlier standard of viability, which was often determined by doctors to be several weeks later. Several states, including Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, have recently set earlier limits.

 

Global Update: Height: Very Poor Women Are Shrinking, as Are Their Chances at a Better Life

The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers.

Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II.

“It’s a sobering picture,” said S. V. Subramanian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author. “It tells you the world is not getting to be a better place for women of lower socioeconomic status. For them, it’s getting worse.”

The study, published last week in the online journal PLoS One, analyzed data on 365,000 adult women in 54 poor and middle-income countries from the hundreds of huge Demographic and Health Surveys paid for largely by American foreign aid.

Only women ages 25 to 49 were included to avoid counting those young and growing, or old and shrinking. Women from Senegal and Chad were the tallest, while those from Guatemala and Bangladesh were the shortest.

The study found that the richest 20 percent of women in all the countries surveyed have grown. Those born in the 1940s averaged 5 feet 1 1/2 inches; those born in the 1980s averaged 5-foot-2.

Those in the poorest 20 percent averaged 5-foot-1, no matter what decade they were born in. Guatemala and Honduras had the biggest gaps in height between rich and poor women; Uganda and Ethiopia (above, where women sorted coffee) had the smallest.

 

Global Update: Height: Very Poor Women Are Shrinking, as Are Their Chances at a Better Life

The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers.

Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II.

“It’s a sobering picture,” said S. V. Subramanian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author. “It tells you the world is not getting to be a better place for women of lower socioeconomic status. For them, it’s getting worse.”

The study, published last week in the online journal PLoS One, analyzed data on 365,000 adult women in 54 poor and middle-income countries from the hundreds of huge Demographic and Health Surveys paid for largely by American foreign aid.

Only women ages 25 to 49 were included to avoid counting those young and growing, or old and shrinking. Women from Senegal and Chad were the tallest, while those from Guatemala and Bangladesh were the shortest.

The study found that the richest 20 percent of women in all the countries surveyed have grown. Those born in the 1940s averaged 5 feet 1 1/2 inches; those born in the 1980s averaged 5-foot-2.

Those in the poorest 20 percent averaged 5-foot-1, no matter what decade they were born in. Guatemala and Honduras had the biggest gaps in height between rich and poor women; Uganda and Ethiopia (above, where women sorted coffee) had the smallest.

 

Global Update: Height: Very Poor Women Are Shrinking, as Are Their Chances at a Better Life

The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers.

Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II.

“It’s a sobering picture,” said S. V. Subramanian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author. “It tells you the world is not getting to be a better place for women of lower socioeconomic status. For them, it’s getting worse.”

The study, published last week in the online journal PLoS One, analyzed data on 365,000 adult women in 54 poor and middle-income countries from the hundreds of huge Demographic and Health Surveys paid for largely by American foreign aid.

Only women ages 25 to 49 were included to avoid counting those young and growing, or old and shrinking. Women from Senegal and Chad were the tallest, while those from Guatemala and Bangladesh were the shortest.

The study found that the richest 20 percent of women in all the countries surveyed have grown. Those born in the 1940s averaged 5 feet 1 1/2 inches; those born in the 1980s averaged 5-foot-2.

Those in the poorest 20 percent averaged 5-foot-1, no matter what decade they were born in. Guatemala and Honduras had the biggest gaps in height between rich and poor women; Uganda and Ethiopia (above, where women sorted coffee) had the smallest.

 

Lack of Success Terminates Study in Africa of AIDS Prevention in Women

Early data showed no evidence that the pill was working.

Women taking the medication, Truvada, were just as likely as those taking a placebo to become infected, according to an independent panel that analyzed the results after the study had enrolled about half the 4,000 women researchers had hoped to enlist.

Of the 1,900 women taking Truvada or a placebo, 28 in each group had become infected as of last week, according to FHI, formerly Family Health International, the nonprofit group that was conducting the study in South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania.

“It’s surprising, disappointing and frustrating,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, an advocacy group for AIDS prevention in New York. “But there’s a strong rationale for continuing other trials in women in hopes of obtaining better results in the future.”

Two other studies of what is called “pre-exposure prophylaxis” in women are still under way in Africa. The results are expected over the next two years.

The inconclusive results of the latest trial are a surprise to many experts. A study published last November found that Truvada protected gay men against infection. Men who took their pills faithfully were shown to have better than 90 percent protection, a result hailed as a breakthrough for AIDS prevention.

And results published last summer from a trial in South Africa showed that a vaginal gel containing tenofovir, one of the two antiretroviral drugs in Truvada, reduced the chances of infection by 54 percent in the women who used it faithfully before and after sex.

Because the current study — known as FEM-PReP on the list of catchy acronyms scientists use to distinguish many similar trials from one another — was stopped early and abruptly, many questions about it remain.

One is whether there was any difference in how often the women given Truvada and those given a placebo actually took their pills. More women taking Truvada complained of unpleasant side effects, and therefore a greater number might have failed to adhere to the program.

The researchers asked the women every month how often they took their pills, but preferred to confirm those answers through blood samples. The samples are in storage and have not yet been analyzed.

After that is done, “we might be able to get a better handle on the adherence,” said Dr. Timothy Mastro, vice president for health and development sciences of FHI.

Any woman who became pregnant was removed from the study, because Truvada has not been proved safe for pregnant women; for unknown reasons, more women taking the medication became pregnant, which may also have skewed the early results.

Another question is how much Truvada infused the walls of the vagina, where the initial infection takes place.

According to Dr. Robert M. Grant, a California AIDS researcher who led the study of Truvada in gay men, other research has shown that vaginal gels are as much as 100 times more effective than pills at getting protective antiretroviral drugs into the vaginal walls. Pills and gels are about equally effective in getting them into rectal tissue, he said.

 

Head of Surgeons Group Resigns Over Article Viewed as Offensive to Women

In a statement sent by e-mail to The New York Times, the surgeon, Dr. Lazar Greenfield, said his many apologies had been ignored. “Therefore, rather than have this remain a disruptive issue, I resigned as president-elect,” he said. “I only hope that those who choose to judge me will read the article in the spirit in which it was intended.”

Dr. Greenfield, 78, was the editor in chief of Surgery News when the editorial was published but resigned that position in the wake of the controversy; the entire issue of the newspaper was withdrawn. He is an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine.

The editorial cited research that found that female college students who had had unprotected sex were less depressed than those whose partners used condoms. It speculated that compounds in semen have antidepressant effects.

“So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates,” it concluded.

The editorial outraged many women in the field, some of whom said that it reflected a macho culture in surgery that needed to change.

Dr. Barbara Bass, chairwoman of the department of surgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston and a former regent of the surgery group, the largest professional association for surgeons, said in a telephone interview Sunday that she was glad Dr. Greenfield had resigned, despite his long history of supporting women in the profession.

“Some things you can’t recover from if you’re in a leadership role,” Dr. Bass said.

She said the resignation demonstrated that the surgery association’s leadership “does understand the continued challenges women face as they join and mature in the surgical profession.”

Others said the resignation would not end the controversy.

Dr. Colleen Brophy, a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, submitted a letter of resignation from the surgery association during the controversy and said Sunday that she had no intention of reversing herself now that Dr. Greenfield has resigned.

“The editorial was just a symptom of a much larger problem,” Dr. Brophy said. “The way the college is set up right now is for the sake of the leadership instead of patients.”

Dr. David B. Hoyt, executive director of the American College of Surgery, said in an e-mail on Sunday that the college would have an official statement regarding Dr. Greenfield on Monday. On Thursday, Dr. Hoyt sent a statement to The Times that the college’s board of regents “is aware of the issue and has taken the matter under advisement.” On Friday, the college put a comment on The Times’s Web site stating that it “deeply regrets the offense taken to Dr. Greenfield’s editorial about Valentine’s Day.”

Dr. Marie L. Crandall, an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern University, said women were advancing slowly in the field of surgery. “It’s better than it was 20 or even 10 years ago,” she said, adding, “I think we’re making progress.”

 

Head of Surgeons Group Resigns Over Article Viewed as Offensive to Women

In a statement sent by e-mail to The New York Times, the surgeon, Dr. Lazar Greenfield, said his many apologies had been ignored. “Therefore, rather than have this remain a disruptive issue, I resigned as president-elect,” he said. “I only hope that those who choose to judge me will read the article in the spirit in which it was intended.”

Dr. Greenfield, 78, was the editor in chief of Surgery News when the editorial was published but resigned that position in the wake of the controversy; the entire issue of the newspaper was withdrawn. He is an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine.

The editorial cited research that found that female college students who had had unprotected sex were less depressed than those whose partners used condoms. It speculated that compounds in semen have antidepressant effects.

“So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates,” it concluded.

The editorial outraged many women in the field, some of whom said that it reflected a macho culture in surgery that needed to change.

Dr. Barbara Bass, chairwoman of the department of surgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston and a former regent of the surgery group, the largest professional association for surgeons, said in a telephone interview Sunday that she was glad Dr. Greenfield had resigned, despite his long history of supporting women in the profession.

“Some things you can’t recover from if you’re in a leadership role,” Dr. Bass said.

She said the resignation demonstrated that the surgery association’s leadership “does understand the continued challenges women face as they join and mature in the surgical profession.”

Others said the resignation would not end the controversy.

Dr. Colleen Brophy, a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, submitted a letter of resignation from the surgery association during the controversy and said Sunday that she had no intention of reversing herself now that Dr. Greenfield has resigned.

“The editorial was just a symptom of a much larger problem,” Dr. Brophy said. “The way the college is set up right now is for the sake of the leadership instead of patients.”

Dr. David B. Hoyt, executive director of the American College of Surgery, said in an e-mail on Sunday that the college would have an official statement regarding Dr. Greenfield on Monday. On Thursday, Dr. Hoyt sent a statement to The Times that the college’s board of regents “is aware of the issue and has taken the matter under advisement.” On Friday, the college put a comment on The Times’s Web site stating that it “deeply regrets the offense taken to Dr. Greenfield’s editorial about Valentine’s Day.”

Dr. Marie L. Crandall, an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern University, said women were advancing slowly in the field of surgery. “It’s better than it was 20 or even 10 years ago,” she said, adding, “I think we’re making progress.”