Category Archives: Gender

Women rally to save Pakistan’s taboo-busting ‘Oprah show’

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Crowdfunder allows Kanwal Ahmed to keep sharing advice on sex, violence… and cooking

A social media star has been dubbed Pakistan’s Kickstarter Oprah after her groundbreaking digital talk show in which women talk about taboo issues such as marital rape, cyberbullying and femicide was saved by fans.

Filming started this week on the new series of Conversations With Kanwal, in which presenter Kanwal Ahmed, 31, sheds light on issues that are rarely talked about within families, let alone in the public arena, after fans raised more than five million rupees (around £23,000) in less than a week using the online crowdfunding platform.

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Gal power: is Wonder Woman 1984 the first #MeToo superhero movie?

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Gal Gadot does battle with supervillains and everyday sexism in DC’s cliche-clobbering sequel. Is it a sign of the genre’s future?

There’s a scene in Wonder Woman 1984 where the luminous Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) glides into a crowded party. Everyone is staring at her – but this is no Cinderella moment, with admiring glances and a collective gasp. It’s an exposé of sexual harassment. The camera switches to Diana’s POV, and we experience a series of persistent, entitled men cracking on to a woman who is clearly not interested. It’s a rare case of a superhero movie showing everyday sexism from the woman’s point of view.

Related: Wonder Woman 1984 review – queenly Gal Gadot disarms the competition

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Paris city hall fined for putting too many women in senior roles

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Paris mayor to pay fine of €90,000 for breaking national rules in 2018 on gender parity

Paris city authorities have been fined for employing too many women in senior positions, a decision mocked as absurd by the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, on Tuesday.

The fine of €90,000 (£81,000) was demanded by France’s public service ministry on the grounds that Paris city hall had broken national rules on gender parity in its 2018 staffing.

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‘Alarming’: female prison population rises by 100,000 in past decade – report

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New data finds number of women behind bars growing, despite most being convicted of low-level nonviolent crimes

The number of women being jailed globally has increased by more than 100,000 in the past decade, despite international rules aimed at reducing the female prison population.

New data released by Penal Reform International around the 10th anniversary of the “Bangkok Rules” adopted by the UN show there are now 741,000 women and girls in prison.

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More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru

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More than 1,500 researchers also sign letter after Black expert on ethics says Google tried to suppress her research on bias

More than 1,200 Google employees and more than 1,500 academic researchers are speaking out in protest after a prominent Black scientist studying the ethics of artificial intelligence said she was fired by Google after the company attempted to suppress her research and she criticized its diversity efforts.

Timnit Gebru, who was the technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that she had been fired after sending an email to an internal group for women and allies working in the company’s AI unit.

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World Athletics accused over ‘abusive sex testing’ of athletes from global south

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Human Rights Watch says testing regulations are demeaning and target women based on racial stereotypes

World Athletics, the sport’s global governing body, targets women from countries in the global south for “abusive sex testing” based on arbitrary definitions of femininity and racial stereotypes, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

A report by the rights group, published on Friday, claims female runners are being pushed out of competitive events, which some rely on for their livelihoods. Athletes struggle with emotional trauma and feel discriminated against and humiliated by the testing, said HRW.

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Elliot Page: star of X-Men and Juno announces he is transgender

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Actor takes aim at transphobic politicians and ‘those with a massive platform who continue to spew hostility’, saying they ‘have blood on [their] hands’

Elliot Page, who rose to fame as the lead in teen pregnancy comedy Juno as Ellen Page, has announced he is transgender.

“Hi friends,” he wrote on a variety of social media platforms, “I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot.”

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Can dozens of new Republican congresswomen change the face of the GOP?

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Moving away from a white- and male-dominated party is the only way for it to survive, pollster says

Kat Cammack was raised on a cattle ranch by a working class single mother. She was the third generation of her family to go into business as a sand blaster. And at 32, she is about to become the youngest Republican woman in the US Congress.

“I think a lifetime of experiences has shaped me to be a Republican and a conservative,” said Cammack, elected to an open seat in Florida. “There has been a stereotype about the Republican party, that it was the Grand Old Party, that it was your grandfather’s political party of choice. The election in 2020 has definitely helped push back on that narrative.”

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‘Shadow pandemic’ of violence against women to be tackled with $25m UN fund

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At least 30% will go to the women-led grassroots organisations that have been ‘critical’ through Covid pandemic

The UN is to spend $25m (£19m) from its emergency fund to address what has been called the “shadow pandemic” of gender-based violence against women displaced by wars and disasters.

The money will be divided between the UN population fund (UNFPA) and UN Women, and at least 30% of it must be given to women-led local organisations that prevent violence and help survivors access medical and legal help, family planning, mental health services and counselling.

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Respect and value girls – they can transform Africa’s security and prosperity | Graça Machel

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Investment in girls brings socioeconomic benefits, but too many countries lack the political will to bring about equality of opportunity

By 2050, Africa will be home to around half a billion girls and young women. If respected and treated as equals, they have the potential to transform the continent’s security and prosperity. This matters because every penny invested in girls’ education, healthcare and social protection benefits society many times over, while failure to invest in girls results in monumental socioeconomic losses.

Child marriage alone has resulted in human capital and revenue losses equivalent to three times the entire flow of international aid into the continent. As a mother and grandmother, it weighs heavily on me to see millions of girls robbed of their futures and the potential of our continent diminished.

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New Zealand’s politicians are too middle-class to tackle our biggest problems | Bryce Edwards

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They can celebrate diversity and gender equality, but Labour must deal with more traditional leftwing concerns like inequality and housing

A very liberal revolution has been occurring in New Zealand politics. Our parliament and Labour-led government are more socially liberal and diverse than ever before, and that’s something for progressives to celebrate.

Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, embodies this, and is lauded as a breath of fresh air in a political world traditionally dominated by “stale, male, and pale” social conservatives. She has just reshuffled the cabinet of her re-elected government, bringing more women, Māori and Pasifika into senior positions. It is the most diverse cabinet in history. The appointment of moko kauae-wearing Nanaia Mahuta as the minister of foreign affairs epitomises this modernisation. Similarly, we have our first openly gay deputy prime minister.

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‘She made music jump into 3D’: Wendy Carlos, the reclusive synth genius

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She went platinum by plugging Bach into 20th-century machines, and was soon working with Stanley Kubrick. But prejudice around her gender transition pushed Wendy Carlos out of sight

This summer, an 80-year-old synthesiser pioneer suddenly appeared online. She had been silent for 11 years, but now something had appeared that she just wouldn’t tolerate. “Please be aware there’s a purported ‘biography’ on me just released,” wrote Wendy Carlos on the homepage of her 16-bit-friendly website, a Siamese cat and a synthesiser behind her portrait. “No one ever interviewed me [for it], nor anyone I know,” she went on. “Aren’t there new, more interesting targets?”

Given that Carlos is arguably the most important living figure in the history of electronic music, it’s remarkable that Amanda Sewell’s Wendy Carlos: A Biography is the first book about her. This is the musician who pushed Robert Moog to perfect his first analogue synthesiser, from which pop, prog, electronica and film music flourished. Her smash-hit 1968 album Switched-On Bach made the Moog internationally famous and became the second classical album ever to go platinum in the US. Then came her extraordinary soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron. She made an ambient album five years before Brian Eno did, and jumped from analogue machines to do leading work in digital synthesis, but worried that her status as one of the first visible transgender artists in the US would overshadow it.

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‘I just want to see the person I always saw in my head’: the story of a face

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How a trans woman found the surgery that could restore her sense of self

When the children at Sophia Drake’s primary school in rural Wales used to talk about what superpower they’d like, she always told them she wanted to be a shapeshifter. “But I didn’t want to be an animal. I didn’t want to be Spider-Man or Muhammad Ali, I just wanted to change into a woman.”

Drake was born biologically male. For as long as she can remember, she felt different and uncomfortable, and experimented with whatever identities and fads she could in an effort to belong. Video games saved her. When she discovered them as a child, she found she could get lost in a world where she could embody any character she liked. “They took me to places where I didn’t have all those issues and problems; I wasn’t this confused child, I could pick who I wanted to be,” she told me.

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Oxford Dictionaries amends ‘sexist’ definitions of the word ‘woman’

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Publisher labels ‘bitch’ as offensive but fails to satisfy some equality campaigners

Oxford University Press has updated its dictionaries’ definitions of the word “woman” following an extensive review triggered by equality campaigners.

Among the updates to Oxford Dictionaries’ definitions is the acknowledgement that a woman can be “a person’s wife, girlfriend, or female lover”, rather than only a man’s.

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‘A backlash against a patriarchal culture’: How Polish protests go beyond abortion rights

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Mass demonstrations have exposed underlying anger at political and religious interference in people’s everyday lives

For 14 nights they have marched, enraged by a near-total ban on abortion that has stirred a generation to stage the largest mass demonstrations that Poland has seen since Solidarność toppled the communist regime in the 1980s.

Until soaring coronavirus numbers and a looming national lockdown made it almost impossible, up to a million people nightly defied a government ban on protests, taking to the streets from Warsaw to Łódź, Poznań to Wrocław, Gdańsk to Kraków.

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Rocky Horror’s Richard O’Brien: ‘I should be dead. I’ve had an excessive lifestyle’

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The creator of the cult show is not going quietly into his 70s. He talks about coming out as trans, going ‘loopy’ on crack – and speaking in tongues after suffering a stroke

Richard O’Brien is 78, but his toothpick body and lightbulb head have always lent him a certain agelessness. A few months ago, however, the rakish Rocky Horror Show creator, Crystal Maze presenter and transgender parent-of-three received a stark reminder of his advancing years.

He was pottering around at home in New Zealand when he suddenly found himself lying on the floor. “I didn’t register that something was desperately wrong,” he says, speaking from the house he shares with his third wife, Sabrina, 10 miles outside of Katikati. “I just thought: ‘I wonder why I can’t get up.’” Struggling to his feet, he attempted to make a drink, only to discover he couldn’t put the top back on the milk. “I was in a dream-like state. Finally, I gave up with the milk, went to go back to the bedroom, slid down the wall and started speaking in tongues. That’s when Sabrina called the ambulance.”

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Single fathers with children via surrogates flee Russia amid crackdown

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Authorities’ attack on LGBT community turns on men who use surrogacy who are assumed to be gay

Several gay men have fled Russia after officials said that they would arrest people “of non-traditional sexual orientation” who had had children through surrogacy. The announcement formed the authorities’ latest attack on the LGBT community.

Surrogacy is legal in Russia but has increasingly been attacked by conservative lawmakers and the Orthodox church. Police arrested a number of top fertility doctors this year and have accused them of “child trafficking” in an ongoing case.

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Nimco Ali calls for frank discussion on violence against women in UK

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Campaigner gives first major interview after being appointed as government adviser on issue

The UK needs a frank conversation about the fear of male violence that women live with every day, according to the government’s new adviser on violence against women and girls.

In her first major interview since her role was announced on Friday, the feminist campaigner Nimco Ali – who has been a key figure in the global fight to end female genital mutilation (FGM) – said she wanted to work across political, ethnic and gender lines.

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Most girls and young women have experienced abuse online, report finds

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Cyberstalking, body shaming and being sent explicit content among issues highlighted by Plan International

Most girls and young women using social media have experienced abuse that has driven them offline and left them traumatised, according to a new global survey.

More than half of the 14,000 15- to 25-year-olds interviewed by Plan International said they had been cyberstalked, sent explicit messages and images, or abused online.

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Forget notions of coronavirus as a great equaliser – women are yet again the hardest hit | Helen Pankhurst

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Just like every emergency, Covid-19 is racist, ageist, classist and sexist. The world response to the pandemic must reflect this

In the early days of coronavirus, there was a view that a global pandemic would act as a great equaliser. “A virus doesn’t discriminate,” they said. “We’re all in this together.” It didn’t take long for such a credulous perspective to vanish.

Just like every emergency, every disaster, Covid-19 absolutely does discriminate. It’s ageist, it’s racist, it’s classist and it’s worst of all for those with pre-existing health conditions or disabilities.

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