Despite significant gains in gender equity over the last few decades, a bias still reigns in one area of medicine. The lack of female representation in both preclinical studies and clinical trials has…
Barack Obama watches Super Bowl.
Pete Souza/Executive Office of the US President
Forget about the Presidential State of the Union address. If you want to understand American values, you need to watch the annual Super Bowl advertisements. This year 114 million people watched the ads…
Why is it that women can retain their heterosexuality if they kiss, but if men do the same they’re labeled gay?
David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons
If women can kiss women and still be straight, what about men? Some scholars have argued that female sexual desires tend to be fluid and receptive, while men’s desires – regardless of whether men are gay…
The reaction to the Ghostbusters 3 cast announcement indicates broader cultural concerns.
Jeff Jackowski
Last week, director Paul Feig announced that the protagonists of Ghostbusters 3 would all be women. While some have heralded the female follow up as a feminist coup, others – including many fans – have…
But what awaits her at home?
Dell's Official Flickr page
David S. Pedulla, The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts et Sarah Thebaud, University of California, Santa Barbara
The latter part of the twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in women’s participation in the workforce as well as a rise in ideological support for women’s employment in the United States. However…
Gemma Arterton and Dagenham veterans protest outside parliament.
Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
News that the West End musical Made in Dagenham will close in April is disappointing on two fronts. Ignore for a moment what it says about the viability of new theatre productions in the capital, and consider…
Let’s bring out the dolls.
Toddlers playing via Daria Filimonova/Shutterstock
The equalities minister, Jo Swinson, has suggested that boys should be encouraged to play with dolls to make them more “nurturing and caring”. This is apparently in the hope that they will become more…
Why do our discussions of creative genius so often confine the conversation to male writers such as Jonathan Franzen?
AAP Image/Harper Collins
I recently watched Salinger (2013), the documentary about the late American writer J.D. Salinger, famous recluse and author of The Catcher in the Rye. In it, the word “genius” was bandied about often and…
The shirt Matt Taylor wore while being interviewed about the Rosetta space mission set off a media and online shirtstorm.
Youtube/ESA
The European Space Agency made history in November by landing a spacecraft on a comet. However, a furious news debate quickly erupted about the shirt worn by 42-year-old British chief of science for the…
There’s a balance between service providers’ responsiveness and responsibility when it comes to online abuse.
Stefan/Flickr
Nicolas Suzor, Queensland University of Technology et Suzannah Wood, Queensland University of Technology
It’s the stuff of nightmares: your intimate images are leaked and posted online by somebody you thought you could trust. But in Australia, victims often have no real legal remedy for this kind of abuse…
Where toys promote aggressiveness in boys and submissiveness in girls, they are definitely part of the problem.
EPA/Jason Szenes
Australia suffers “endemic” levels of men’s violence against women, so if the child is the father of the man, then it’s time we talked about boys’ toys. And what better time to start the conversation than…
Indonesian state institutions reinforce the labelling of women into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ by policing women’s bodies.
EPA/Hotli Simanjuntak
Society often labels women in two categories: “good” and “bad”. Both of these labels reduce women from human beings to stereotypes. They are detrimental to women’s rights as seen in two recent controversies…
Kids don’t always play with toys according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Charles Roark/Flick
On Tuesday Greens Spokesperson for women, Larissa Waters, lent her support to No Gender December – a campaign spearheaded by the group Play Unlimited that aims to highlight the gendered marketing of toys…
The No Gender December campaign suggests that the gender stereotyping of toys restricts children’s creativity and development.
Tracheotomy Bob
“I didn’t encourage my daughter to play with Barbie dolls and dress up in flouncy fairy costumes, but she just gravitated toward them.” When confronted with the idea that gendered marketing and stereotypes…
What is the optimum gender split for productivity?
Image sourced from www.shutterstock.com
Once commonplace, the phenomenon of all-female or all-male workplaces have largely gone the way of the buggy whip. Many of the benefits of this increased diversity might be difficult to measure and quantify…
Evolutionary psychology, the field that uses the process of natural selection to provide a theoretical framework to explain human behaviour, gets in the press a lot. And if there’s one thing that gets…
The clincher of the latest season of Doctor Who? The Doctor’s nemesis is a woman.
ABC Publicity
The latest series of Doctor Who wrapped up on the weekend with the completion of a startling two-episode finale: Dark Waters and Death in Heaven. This season we’ve seen what is perhaps the darkest, edgiest…
Sharon Stone, in Basic Instinct, dramatised the catastrophic actions of a clever yet unhinged woman.
EPA/ Peter Foley
Mental illness and women’s sexuality are frequently aligned – on screen and off. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, pathologised women’s sexuality. Indeed his definition of a woman as someone…
Female members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) helped patrol the outskirts of Makhmur, a northern Iraqi town that was seized back from Islamic State militants in August.
AAP/Eddie Gerald
Women and girls living in Syria and Iraq have been subject to gross sexual violence, economic strife and the psychological trauma of a war that, to them, seems endless. But women in these countries are…
A convicted rapist is no role model for this young fan.
Darren Staples/Reuters
The persistence of violence against women across the globe is well documented, but what part do sports play in gendered aggression? It seems shocking to claim that sports and violence against women are…