Category Archives: Gender

Japan Airlines ditches compulsory high heels and skirts in big win for #KuToo movement

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Company becomes first major employer in the country to stop forcing dress code on women

Female flight attendants working for Japan Airlines will no longer be required to wear high heels or skirts, the airline has said, in a rare victory for Japan’s #KuToo campaign against workplace dress codes for women.

The airline is the first major Japanese company to relax its regulations in response to complaints from women that having to wear high heels was uncomfortable and often left them in considerable pain.

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Joe Biden’s pledge to pick a female vice-president smells like tokenism | Arwa Mahdawi

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Of course I want him to choose a woman as his running mate. But his grand gesture feels more like pandering than policy

Stacey Abrams? Kamala Harris? Elizabeth Warren? Nobody knows for sure whom Joe Biden will choose as a running mate if – as is almost certain – he wins the Democratic nomination, but we do know it will be a woman.

“I’ll pick a woman to be vice-president,” Biden promised during Sunday’s presidential debate with Bernie Sanders. “There are a number of women qualified to be president tomorrow.” While none of those eminently qualified women will be president any time soon, one lucky lady may have the privilege of playing second fiddle to a gaffe-prone white guy. To cement his position as intersectional male feminist of the year, Biden also promised to appoint an African American woman to the supreme court.

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Mexico president’s response to historic femicide protests: more of the same

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A day after thousands protested against the murder of women and girls, López Obrador said he would ‘reinforce the same strategy’

A day after Mexico’s women collectively shut down the country in an eruption of fury over gender violence, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has insisted that he will not try a new strategy to stop femicides.

Thousands of women went on strike on Monday, in a historic protest against the murder of women and girls – and the failure of successive governments’ efforts to stop a crisis in which around 10 women are murdered every day.

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International Women’s Day: events highlighting gender inequality take place around the world – live updates

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On International Women’s Day, we’ll be following the commemorative events all around the world.

Demonstrators from climate activist group Extinction Rebellion have been protesting in London for IWD, arguing that the “climate is a women’s issue.”

Celebrations have been taking place in Tahrir Square in the capital of Baghdad to mark IWD.

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Budget 2020: chancellor plans to finally end tampon tax

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The 5% rate on sanitary products will end. Rishi Sunak also plans to ensure banks keep circulating cash

The chancellor will announce the abolition of the “tampon tax” in next week’s budget, marking the successful conclusion to a 20-year campaign by women’s rights activists.

Tampons and other women’s sanitary products currently have 5% VAT added to their price, but this will be scrapped, saving the average woman £40 over her lifetime. The tax will end when Britain leaves the EU at the end of December.

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Japan prefecture to stop hiring female ‘tea squad’ for meetings

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Saitama assembly hopes move will reflect changing attitudes towards women in workplaces

A local government assembly is attempting to shake up Japan’s conservative workplace culture by ending the custom of employing women to serve tea at meetings.

Few official gatherings in Japan have properly begun until female employees – known collectively as the ochakumi (“tea squad”) – have placed cups of green tea in front of their invariably male senior colleagues, occasionally accompanied by something sweet.

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‘We still have a problem with female authority’: how politics sets a trap for American women

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Elizabeth Warren’s departure shines light on a system that is rife with sexism but rejects candidates who address it

“Gender in this race?” Senator Elizabeth Warren said outside her home on Thursday. “You know that is the trap question for every woman. If you say, ‘Yeah! There was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’ And if you say, ‘No, there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?’”

She added: “I promise you this. I will have a lot more to say on that subject later on.”

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EU revives plans for mandatory quotas of women on company boards

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European-listed firms could face fines if fewer than 40% of their non-executive board seats are taken by women

The European Union executive is reviving plans for mandatory quotas of women on company boards, amid slowing progress towards gender equality among top management.

The EU commissioner for equality, Helena Dalli, told journalists that quotas “can be a very ugly word” but were also “a necessary evil, in the sense we have to use quotas because otherwise we will wait another 100 years for things to change by themselves”.

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Nine out of 10 people found to be biased against women

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Analysis of 75 countries reveals ‘shocking’ scale of global women’s rights backlash

Almost 90% of people are biased against women, according to a new index that highlights the “shocking” extent of the global backlash towards gender equality.

Despite progress in closing the equality gap, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights.

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Girls stay longer in school but obesity, suicide and sexual violence remain risks

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A quarter of a century after world conference pledged to advance gender equality, reports finds opportunities and rights still lacking

Girls are far less likely to get married or drop out of school than ever before, but worryingly high rates of obesity, suicide and sexually transmitted infections underline how uneven global progress has been for them over the past 25 years, according to a report published on Wednesday.

Despite major gains in some aspects of girls’ lives since governments pledged at the fourth world conference on women in 1995 to advance the rights of women and girls, violence against them is still not only common but accepted, claim the UN children’s agency, Plan International, and UN Women. They warn that if discrimination continues, the 2030 gender equality targets are unlikely to be achieved.

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Queensland police’s problem with domestic violence

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Police comments last week that they were keeping an ‘open mind’ on the murder of Hannah Clarke and her three young children by her former partner were widely condemned. In this episode of Full Story, reporter Ben Smee looks at the track record of Queensland police on domestic violence, and we hear from one woman about her own shocking story

You can read Ben Smee’s reporting on Dani’s case here, and his piece about how Hannah Clarke’s murder exposes a ‘failure in our system’.

You can also read his reporting on Queensland woman Julie, who was forced to go into hiding after a senior constable, Neil Punchard, accessed her address from a police database and sent it to her violent former husband.

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Twitter users mock ‘ladies fillet’ steak on Liverpool menu

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Smaller steak advertised as ‘one for the ladies!’ at Manhattan Bar and Grill

A restaurant in Liverpool has attracted online ridicule for selling an 8oz “ladies fillet” steak, which is smaller than the other cuts on its menu.

The entry for the £18.95 dish on the Manhattan Bar and Grill menu reads: “One for the ladies! A beautiful 8oz cut, because we can!”

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Christina Koch returns to Earth after record-breaking space mission

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Koch lands in Kazakhstan after 328 days in space, the longest continuous spaceflight by a female astronaut

She would miss the friendship of her crewmates, she said, and of course the spectacular views.

But after 328 days on the International Space Station – the longest continuous spaceflight ever undertaken by a female astronaut – Christina Koch could not deny last week that she was looking forward to experiencing some very simple pleasures back on Earth, including “the feeling of wind on my face”.

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The Oscars’ 92-year gender gap, visualised

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This year’s all-male nominations for best director are just the latest episode in a long history of women being under-represented at the Academy Awards. We look at the data

The 92nd Academy Awards take place this Sunday. But as a new decade begins, it appears little has improved in the fight for gender equality in Hollywood. Ungendered awards categories are once again dominated by men. Ahead of this year’s ceremony, we examine how the imbalance breaks down. Carry on scrolling to explore.

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‘We just want to dance together,’ say Vienna ball’s first same-sex couple

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Sophie Grau and Iris Klopfer say they are continuing rather than destroying event’s 200-year-old traditions

The first same-sex couple to dance at Vienna’s Opera Ball say they are continuing rather than destroying the event’s 200-year-old traditions, since they are “good dancers and stick to the dress code”.

Sophie Grau and Iris Klopfer, both students from Germany, have been accepted to join the procession of 288 young “debutantes” who will dance their first waltz at the Viennese society event on 20 February.

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Climate breakdown ‘is increasing violence against women’

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Exclusive: attempts to tackle crisis fail because gender issues are not addressed, report finds

Climate breakdown and the global crisis of environmental degradation are increasing violence against women and girls, while gender-based exploitation is in turn hampering our ability to tackle the crises, a major report has concluded.

Attempts to repair environmental degradation and adapt to climate breakdown, particularly in poorer countries, are failing, and resources are being wasted because they do not take gender inequality and the effects on women and girls into account.

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What young women think in 2020

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Children’s charity Plan International UK and photographer Joyce Nicholls travelled across the UK talking to young women about the issues important to them in 2020: public safety, body image, social media and feminism. Their research found that girls are fed up and frustrated with the lack of real progress on gender equality.

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Samira Ahmed reacts after winning equal pay claim against BBC – video

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The presenter said she was glad the case had been won and thanked the NUJ, her lawyers and barrister outside the BBC in London. Judges condemned the BBC’s defence that Ahmed’s job as presenter of the audience feedback show Newswatch was significantly different to Jeremy Vine’s on Points of View and criticised the difference of pay between her £440-an-episode rate and the £3,000 Vine received per episode

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Singular ‘they’ voted word of the decade by US linguists

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American Dialect Society’s choice recognises word’s rising use to refer to person whose gender identity is non-binary

US linguists have chosen “they” as their word of the decade, recognising the growing use of third-person plural pronouns as a singular form to refer to people who identify their gender as neither entirely male nor entirely female.

The American Dialect Society also bestowed its word of the year honours on the increasingly common practice of introducing oneself in correspondence or socially by the set of pronouns one prefers to be called by – declaring in an email, for example, “pronouns: she/her”.

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