Picture this. Your prize horse needs a vaccination. Who should turn up to deliver this but a veterinary graduate of ten years, specialist in equine internal medicine and teacher to veterinary undergraduates…
It is fairly common for media to report incidents of overt sexism and sexual harassment at work. Colleagues demanding sexual favours and verbal and physical abuse are examples of behaviour that have been…
Two topics now compete for the opening paragraph in MP Brooks Newmark’s political obituary. One is of course his hubris in thinking that a 26-year old woman – be she Tory or not – would be interested in…
I don’t often re-read books, partly because there are so many on my unread pile. There are just a few that I go back to over and over again: Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The Bell Jar – and Lucky Jim…
Can men be feminists? As a man who spends a substantial portion of my professional and personal life teaching, researching and thinking about feminism, this is a question I come up against frequently…
Washington father Aaron Dickson’s video in which he takes his three-year old daughter on her “first date” went viral yesterday attracting acclaim (which is great) and disgust (which is disappointing…
Controversy continues to envelop Richard Scudamore, the long-standing Chief Executive of the English Premier League, nearly two weeks after sexist emails he exchanged with business associates were leaked…
A few years ago I conducted a feminist analysis of the Liberal Democrats as my PhD thesis. During the research, people (both inside and outside of the party) would often say my project was “a bit niche…
In the UK, women make up just just 17.3% of FTSE 100 companies’ board members. This puts the UK 5th in the world behind Norway, Sweden, Finland and France. Things are certainly improving: 44% of new appointments…
Martin Luther King said, “On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ And Vanity comes along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But…
While just under half of all philosophy undergraduates in the UK are women, women account for less than a third of PhD completions and less than a quarter of permanent academic staff. So where did all…
It would be tempting to say the tech industry was reeling this week from the blatant discrimination and misogyny that took centre stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in San Francisco. It would be…
Since opposition leader Tony Abbott’s self-described “daggy dad” comments about Liberal candidate Fiona Scott’s sex appeal, gender issues have re-emerged in Australian politics. Labor frontbenchers claim…
Germaine Greer once wrote that women have no idea how much men hate them. Thanks to the internet, now we do. - @PennyRed Since the 1990s, some social commentators have declared that we live in a post-feminist…
Labor may have “ditched the witch”, but does the ejection of Julia Gillard from her seat of power close the book on the debate about sexism that she championed and the role of women in leadership? Our…
By the time the sun set over Parliament House, and took Julia Gillard’s prime ministership with it in a party room vote, the dissection of her legacy as Australia’s first female prime minister had already…
More and more women are requesting surgery to replace their hymens, in an effort to “fake” virginity. But virginity is a psychological state, and a hymen is no reliable indicator it exists. The idea of…
Politics and identity have collided with unusual force in Australian politics over the past year, reaching a crescendo in the last week. Beginning with Julia Gillard’s “misogyny speech” to parliament…
The denigration of the first female Australian prime minister on the basis of her gender echoes that endured by the first female prime minister of Great Britain. While Julia Gillard has suffered the juvenile…
Sepp Blatter, the 77-year-old president of FIFA, the international governing body of football, has put his foot in it – again. Having made suggestions in 2004 that women in sport should wear tight shorts…