Our obsession with women’s weight and attractiveness manifests in different ways in the media, including being sold images that are far removed from reality and often impossible to achieve, or focusing…
Warning: this article contains spoilers. The eighth series of Doctor Who began by introducing a new Doctor, in the shape of Peter Capaldi. But now we’ve reached its end an even greater talking point is…
The lady razor: pink, pricier, and less effective.
MeePoohyaPhoto/Shutterstock
Women are paid less than men for the same work, despite the Equal Pay Act in the UK. These are statistics that we are familiar with. Women earn 85p for every £1 a man earns. But, adding insult to injury…
Outlander might draw on the conventions of romance, but it’s a mistake to dismiss it as “just” romance.
Fox
Television series Outlander made its debut on the small screen in August this year, to the acclaim of both reviewers and fans. Critical tongues are wagging, tumblr gifs abound, and Etsy has been inundated…
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…
How does a woman make art history, asks !Women Art Revolution, an American documentary that screened at the Melbourne Festival.
Melbourne Festival
The central premise of American director Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film !Women Art Revolution (2010), which screened at the Melbourne Festival over the weekend, is summarised near its conclusion: “When artists…
Jade Anouka as Hotspur and company rehearsing for Henry IV.
Helen Maybanks
Shakespeare’s King Henry IV recently opened at the Donmar. And it has a twist. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd and starring Harriet Walter as the king, the production follows Lloyd’s acclaimed Julius Caesar…
The fallout from Watson’s UN speech suggests we’re far from gender equality.
It is now more than a week since actress Emma Watson delivered what has repeatedly been described as a “game-changing” speech about sexism at the United Nations New York headquarters. The response to the…
UN Women Goodwill Ambassador and actor Emma Watson launched the HeForShe Campaign at the United Nations headquarters in New York, 20 September.
EPA/JASON SZENES
In less than a week since actor Emma Watson’s stirring United Nations speech on gender inequality, two big things have happened – but you’ve probably only heard about one of them. The first, which has…
Several British theatres have made a pledge to address the levels of gender inequality on the contemporary stage. And a theatre complex in Sheffield has gone a step further, promising to create parts for…
Sarkeesian has been the focus of much online hatred since she started her website Feminist Frequency in 2009.
Anita Sarkeesian
Three weeks ago, well-known feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian was forced to leave her San Francisco home due to an ongoing tirade of abuse and threats. Members of a vocal minority of online trolls…
Having recently attended my university’s graduation ceremony, I noted again what seems to have become a global trend — design is becoming a field where the majority of practitioners are women. I have made…
Women’s Liberation was a worldwide mobilisation that paved the way for powerful critiques of conventional thinking about gender, sexuality and identity.
Warren K. Leffler, 1970/Library of Congress
The past four decades have produced gains around the world for women and girls in literacy, formal education, life expectancy, workforce participation and access to some professions. We have also seen…
The hijab isn’t a symbol of oppression for many women.
diegofornero
Terrorism, oppression, fundamentalism and victimhood are only a few of the buzzwords that inevitably accompany discussions about Islamic headgear. From burqa-bans to atrocities against women in some Islamic…
The legal doctrine of coverture effectively suspended women’s legal existence.
D. Sarle
This week’s episode of ABC’s typically male-dominated show Q&A involved a panel of women who were speakers at Sydney’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI). While the show presented far more conservative…
There’s a thriving community of Women against Feminism – but how do their claims match up to the reality of women’s lives?
Screenshot from womanagainstfeminism.tumblr.com
Australian university campuses last week marked Bluestocking Week, a celebration that remembers the first women who entered English universities in the late 19th century. Women in lecture halls were pioneering…
So I read this great piece on Jezebel …
Yui Mok/PA
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…
Whoa there, little lady: women in the workforce face a financial penalty for simply being female.
Flickr/ Boston Public Library
While many aspects of working life have changed in recent decades, the inequality of outcomes experienced by male and female employees has been remarkably resistant. Within corporate Australia the proportion…
How is gender inequality explained in the ‘postfeminist’ age?
AAP/ Bernard Menigault
Women have struggled for greater participation in spheres reserved for men in every nation, dating back at least to 620BCE. Yet there is no society on the planet in which women are equally represented…
Beyonce recently topped Forbes’s celebrity power list. “Who runs the world?” they ask. “In entertainment, it’s Beyonce.” This resonates particularly with me, since for the last few years I’ve been offering…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne