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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I got the phone call about 6pm on Tuesday night. “Mum,” said the voice. “Mum, are you OK?” Turns out that one of my children had stumbled across a few sentences written by the Daily Telegraph blogger Tim…
As you may have seen, the Daily Telegraph blogger Tim Blair ran a much-tweeted-about poll yesterday asking: “Who is Australia’s craziest left-wing frightbat?”. Leaving aside the backlash, which was considerable…
I’ve tried to ignore the patronising viral “Rules for Women during the World Cup” tweets, I am ignoring Facebook offers to go to a spa for “girly bubbles” to escape the football. But the idea of actually…
In the last year there’s been a resurgence of media engagement with the Suffragettes, the most militant wing of the first wave feminist movement between 1890 and 1919. It began with two television programmes…
Executives from four major news providers – BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky – have pledged to try to improve the number of women interviewed as experts on their programmes; and this summer will be the test…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne