Synchronized Swimmers Do you remember Caster Semenya – winner of the World Championship 800m gold medal in 2009? The International Olympics Committee hasn’t forgotten her and is hoping to test ‘some women’ to prevent those with abnormally high testosterone levels from competing ‘as women’; and in principle one supposes to prevent men competing in women’s […]
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Olympics Will the 2012 Olympics be remembered as having provided a platform for women’s rights and gender equality. – amongst all the other expectations hope and dreams attached to it? For the first time all competing countries will send female athletes https://www.gendercentric.org/16-newsflash/55-olympic-game-changers; and women will be able to compete in all events. As already noted
Honour Killing The recent killing of Shafilea Ahmed by her parents has put the issues of honour killing and multi-culturalism in the UK squarely back on the front burner, with some commentators calling for the abandonment of the term ‘honour killing’ on the grounds that ‘honour killings are just (sic) murder – it’s as simple
Peace not War A call to have more women taking part in peace-making missions, in line with UN Security Council Resolution 1325 Women, Peace and Security (2000) is not being received with the acclaim that was probably expected. See comments to the Guardian article http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/sep/20/harmony-women-peace-deals which also criticize the sainted Guardian itself for publishing the
Quotas Interestingly enough this comes at the same time as the European Commission postponed its own proposal that would oblige companies to allot 40% of their board seats to women by 2020. http://awid.org/News-Analysis/Women-s-Rights-in-the-News2/EU-parliament-vetoes-Mersch-wants-woman-for-ECB ECB ‘s 23-member governing council is made up of six executive board members and 17 national central bank chiefs of euro zone
Titanic Will the Titanic provide equality & diversity experts with much-needed new case-studies for training on ‘intersectionality’ – roughly to be translated as the point where different discriminations…gender, race, class, religion, nationality… intersect, or maybe collide…like ships and ice-bergs ? Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality if you dare. Intersectionality tells us that individuals discriminated against on one parameter….such
Childbirth We can say that the ability to conceive and bear children is the last frontier of gender equality; it is possibly the least contested arena & the best illustration of the words of the Edward Koren cartoon in the New Yorker ‘Despite my best efforts you’re still the man and I’m still the woman’.
UK Slips It can of course be argued that the actual numbers of men and of women in political decision-making do not matter. Senior women can notoriously be deaf and blind to gender equality issues once they have crashed or soared through the glass ceiling themselves (you know who you are);and both men and women
DSK The European Women’s Lobby (EWL) which is spearheading this renewed initiative (http://www.womenlobby.org/spip.php?article4084&lang=en) takes as inspiration going forward the ‘Swedish model’. The 1999 Swedish law on violence against women qualified prostitution as a form of male violence against women and attacked the demand side of this relationship by criminalizing the purchase of sex through the
Vicar. Perhaps it’s time for a flash-back to happier times; Dawn French, Richard Curtis -where are you? The BBC sitcom created by Curtis was explicitly designed to open hearts and minds to the prospect of women vicars. We can do no better on this occasion than to cite wikipedia in full: The Vicar of Dibley