A friend of mine calls me professor of genius studies. It’s a sort of slip of the tongue, as I teach in gender studies, but it‘s also funny because everyone knows that genius is not associated with gender…
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…
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…
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…
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…
David S. Pedulla, The University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts e 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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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 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…
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…
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…