Category Archives: Women

Black Women Photographers on what International Women’s Day means to them

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We hear from a some of the members of the Black Women Photographers collective, a group facilitating greater diversity in editorial photography

The Black Women Photographers collective, established via a Covid-19 relief fund, is approaching its second year of promoting and empowering Black female photographers, as well as increasing the visibility of their work.

In March, a virtual summit supported by Adobe will feature Raven B Varona, Kimberly Douglas, aka @kihmberlie, Audrey Woulard, Lola Flash, Lola Akinmade Åkerström, Amanda J Cain, NHL’s first Black woman team photographer, Whitney Matewe, DeLovie Kwagala, Cheriss May, Sade Ndya, Chaya Howell and Idara Ekpoh.

2017: My friends Dara and Isioma, who I have known since 2008 in boarding school. This photo was taken at one of our many mini alumni meetups. After spending six years of the most formative parts of our adolescence in a remote school campus – loving, hating and knowing each other – we can say that we come from each other.

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Going places: 10 inspirational female adventurers

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To mark International Women’s Day on Tuesday, these great women offer inspiration on how to power up your own adventures

Rhiane launched the non-profit organisation Black Girls Hike in Bolton in 2019 to create a safe space for Black women to explore the outdoors and connect with nature. It’s now a nationwide organisation hosting hikes, training events and activity weekends, and she won a positive role model award for gender at the National Diversity Awards in 2021.

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Women still fear for their safety but are louder and more determined than ever

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Analysis: women have found their voice, and are demanding to be heard

Where do women in the UK find themselves on International Women’s Day in 2022? In truth: more fearful about their safety, more anxious about their economic futures and wondering if the monumental gains made in gender equality over the last decades are at risk. But they are also louder and more determined than ever.

It is impossible to reflect on the last 12 months without focusing on the seismic revolution of understanding of male violence against women and girls (VAWG).

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Next stop, Sylvia Plath! Why it is time to redraw the London Underground map

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The official London tube map has only three stops named after women. Together with the actor Emma Watson and the author Rebecca Solnit, I’ve been working on a feminist alternative. Here’s the story behind our contribution to International Women’s Day

When I was a baby feminist, I would argue with friends that public space was political. I had been radicalised by my teenage years, sick to the back teeth of street harassment from men who seemed to think that the streets were theirs to roam freely, while women were relegated to decoration. It wasn’t a regular occurrence, but it happened enough times to enrage me. Walking home from school in London, in uniform, I had been followed, had my arm snatched and had been approached at least once by a man who displayed stalking tendencies. As I grew older, I understood these actions as displays of dominance and I was disgusted. Alongside my indignation, I was crushingly disappointed. I had been raised in this city and hated that this kind of behaviour was an impediment to my teenage desire for autonomy and freedom.

I had been navigating public transport by myself for years at that point, and it took me everywhere I wanted to go. Once I had exhausted my immediate surroundings on foot, I’d take the Piccadilly line to gigs at the now bulldozed Astoria on Charing Cross Road. I’d jump on the Hammersmith and City line, a portal to dancing all day at Notting Hill carnival. The Circle line made me feel like an intellectual in the museums of South Kensington. There was no option back then to outsource travel plans to a clever little app, so in order to go anywhere I, like everyone else, would have to study the tube map to find out how to get to my destination. If I was feeling brave, I’d sometimes jump on the tube at Turnpike Lane and work it out as I went along, peering at the mini maps inside the train carriage and looming awkwardly over whoever was sitting in the seat beneath. I didn’t need a car. The map in my pocket opened up my city.

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Companies with female leaders outperform those dominated by men, data shows

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Labour’s Anneliese Dodds says women should play a central role in the UK’s post-pandemic economic recovery

Women should play a central role in the UK’s post-pandemic economic recovery, with evidence revealing companies with more female leaders outperform those dominated by men, according to House of Commons research.

Accusing the government of ignoring women’s needs during the coronavirus pandemic and side-lining them in plans for recovery, the shadow secretary for women and equalities, Anneliese Dodds, said the data showed women held the key to a stronger economy, but they were being held back by a lack of investment and the risk of “childcare deserts” in parts of the country.

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First female judge presides over hearing at top court in Egypt

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Radwa Helmi sits on bench of state council, marking ‘historic’ step along road to equality

Radwa Helmi has made history as the first female judge to sit on the bench of Egypt’s state council, a top court in the Arab country.

Helmi, making her appearance in a Cairo courthouse, was among 98 women appointed last year to join the council, one of Egypt’s main judicial bodies, after a decision by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

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Afghan journalist Zahra Joya among Time’s women of the year

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Now a refugee in the UK, Joya and the Rukhshana Media agency defied threats to report on life for women under the Taliban

The Afghan journalist Zahra Joya has been named as one of Time’s women of the year 2022 for her reporting of women’s lives in Afghanistan through her news agency, Rukhshana Media.

Now living as a refugee in the UK, Joya continues to run Rukhshana Media from exile, publishing the reporting of her team of female journalists across Afghanistan on life for women under Taliban rule.

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‘When I surf I feel so strong’: Sri Lankan women’s quiet surfing revolution

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Women and girls have challenged conservative attitudes in the hallowed surf spot of Arugam Bay

Growing up in a small fishing village along the east coast of Sri Lanka, Shamali Sanjaya would often sit on the beach and look out at the boisterous waves. She would watch in envy as others, including her father and brother, grabbed surfboards, paddled out into the sea and then rode those waves smoothly back to shore. “I longed for it in my heart,” she said.

But as a local woman, surfing was strictly out of bounds for her. In Sri Lanka’s conservative society, the place for women was at the home and it was only the men, or female tourists, who were allowed to ride the hallowed waves in Arugam Bay, considered Sri Lanka’s best surf spot.

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‘A radiant expectant mother’: Rihanna and the rise of the power bump

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Pop star challenges perceptions of pregnancy by wearing black negligee to Dior show at Paris fashion week

It was a moment of pure joy at a Paris fashion week sobered by the shadow of war. Rihanna sailed into the Dior show like a galleon in full sail, pregnancy bump lightly veiled in a sheer black negligee of lace-trimmed dotted Swiss tulle. The veteran fashion critic Tim Blanks, who quizzed the pop star backstage as to whether she was expecting a boy or a girl – she wasn’t telling – described her as “the most radiant expectant mother … a real ray of light on a dark day.”

In the month since the unofficial new “Queen of Barbados” announced her pregnancy by posing for the paparazzi photographer Miles Diggs on a snowy New York street with a vintage Chanel pink coat unbuttoned to reveal a naked bump crowned with a cascade of gold and gemstone jewellery, Rihanna has done more than push the boundaries of maternity wear. In characteristic form, she is challenging expectations of how women in the public eye should look and behave.

Rihanna, who wore a fluffy lavender coat over a black latex crop top at Gucci and a peach leather mini dress for the Off-White show, has not been the only expectant mother in the spotlight at this month of fashion shows. At the young designer Nensi Dojaka’s London fashion week show, the tissue-thin sequined slip worn by the model Maggie Maurer celebrated her four-month pregnant shape. “I think it’s quite shocking – in a good way,” Maurer told Vogue. “Women’s bodies are like superpowers.”

In the age of optics, announcing a pregnancy via the medium of fashion has established itself as a power move. A timeline shift toward ever more daring takes on bump-dressing can be tracked via the maternity fashion of a thought leader in this field, Beyoncé. When Beyoncé revealed her first pregnancy in 2011 at the MTV Video Music Awards during her performance of Love on Top – by unbuttoning her sequined blazer and turning to give the audience a profile view – the bump was demurely covered-up in a white shirt and high-waisted trousers.

By the time Beyoncé was pregnant with twins in 2017, the rules of engagement had altered. This time around, Beyoncé made the reveal wearing only a bra and satin knickers, cradling her bump in front of a flower arbour with a veil falling over her shoulders as softly as the hair of Botticelli’s Venus, in an image that set a new record for Instagram likes.

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Blondie’s Debbie Harry: ‘It wasn’t a great idea to be as reckless as I was’

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The singer and style icon answers your questions on becoming ‘Blondie’, a lifetime cheating death – and the secret to a good cover version

Hey, Debbie, in Face It [Harry’s memoir], you discussed the creation of the Blondie persona. How intentional were your choices in character curation, and why did you choose to adopt a persona in the first place? ChloSchmo

I think we’re all seeing images or performances that we like and absorbing and amalgamating them. As a kid, the beautiful women on the silver screen were fairytale versions of what life is for a woman, because when I was coming up there was no such thing as women’s lib. A persona gave me freedom, a world of my own. You pick a character that you love and then it becomes you.

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Covid has intensified gender inequalities, global study finds

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Researchers find women hit harder by negative social and economic impacts of the pandemic than men

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic threatens to reverse decades of progress made towards gender equality, according to a global study that reveals women have been hit much harder socially and economically than men.

Previously, coronavirus-related gender disparity studies have focused on the direct health impacts of the crisis. It is well known, for example, that across the globe men have experienced higher rates of Covid cases, hospitalisation and death. However, until now, few studies have examined how gender inequalities have been affected by the many indirect social and economic effects of the pandemic worldwide.

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To end FGM, the UK must protect girls everywhere, not just in Britain | Charlotte Proudman

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British women and girls are still being cut abroad and foreigners who are vulnerable are denied asylum by the UK

‘But why should we care about a practice that is being performed overseas?” It was a blunt question put to me by an audience member at a conference on female genital mutilation. Should we care because of a commitment to human rights? Our collective duty to prevent suffering? We have a moral obligation to end the practice in Britain and also to focus efforts on eliminating it globally.

After spending many years researching FGM, I have spoken to women who vehemently support it and those that actively resist it. If we are going to end FGM, it is important that we hear all women’s voices, however uncomfortable that may make us.

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Lena Zavaroni: fame, anorexia and the tragedy of a 1970s child star

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Zavaroni was in the charts at 11 and died after years of illness aged 35. Her father talks about their family life as a new stage show about her is about to open

There are a few recordings of television interviews with Lena Zavaroni around online. One with Russell Harty where he comments that her eating disorder must save on restaurant bills and another when Terry Wogan tells her to eat up so she can get back to “your chunky self”.

The little girl with the big voice was 10 when she appeared on Opportunity Knocks – television’s predecessor to Britain’s Got Talent and Pop Idol – singing Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me, 11 when it was a hit and 13 when she was diagnosed with anorexia, a barely known illness then called the “slimmer’s disease”. Before she died in 1999 the girl from Rothesay on the Scottish island of Bute had hosted her own TV shows, performed at the White House and shared a stage with Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball. She remains the youngest artist ever to have a record in the Top 10 UK albums chart. Lena was huge.

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Warsan Shire talks to Bernardine Evaristo about becoming a superstar poet: ‘Beyoncé sent flowers when my children were born’

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One is a breakout poet, the other is a Booker-winning champion of Black talent. They swap notes on class, impostor syndrome and the day pop’s biggest star came knocking

When an email from Beyoncé’s office first landed in Warsan Shire’s inbox, she assumed it was some kind of prank. It wasn’t. Beyoncé – the real Beyoncé – was inviting Shire, a 27-year-old British-Somali poet from Wembley, north-west London, to collaborate. The result was the revolutionary 2016 visual album Lemonade, on which Shire is credited with “film adaptation and poetry”; her verses are read aloud between songs. Shire has also since contributed work to Beyoncé’s 2020 film Black is King and wrote a specially commissioned poem, I Have Three Hearts, to announce the singer’s 2017 pregnancy with twins.

But even before Beyoncé came knocking, Shire was starward bound. After a responsibility-laden adolescence, spent combining writing with co-parenting her three younger siblings, Shire published her debut chapbook of poems, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth in 2011, aged just 23. In 2013, she was appointed the first Young People’s Laureate for London and in 2015, her poem Home became a viral anthem for the refugee crisis. Shire’s first full poetry collection, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head, comes out next month. In between these professional milestones, she also found time to meet and marry a Mexican American charity worker called Andres, move continents, and have two children.

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‘The ultimate single woman’s icon’: how Mrs Maisel is an inspiration across the years

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From defiantly turning her back on male approval to her seamlessly snappy defiance of the ‘women aren’t funny’ trope, Midge is a warrior whose example still resonates

The best line so far in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel – the Emmy award-winning comedy drama about a New York-50s-housewife-turned-standup-comic – isn’t a joke she delivers in a set on a dingy club stage. It isn’t even one of the endless, off-stage zingers by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (also behind Gilmore Girls). It is, in fact, the searing three-word reply that Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) fires at her husband, Joel (Michael Zegen), halfway through season one, when he asks why she won’t give their marriage another shot: “Because you left.”

In that moment, Mrs Maisel becomes the ultimate single woman’s icon. In a world that measures her success and identity by her marital status, she makes the decision to be a single mother and blindly embrace whatever is ahead. While the social stigmas attached to being unmarried might have relaxed since Midge’s time, the reality today is this: in 2019 five hospital trusts and six clinical commissioning groups banned single women from accessing IVF; our prime minister once said the children of single women are “ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate”; single people feel priced out of owning a house while couples have a double income; and – take it from someone who knows – if you’re not standing on a soapbox shouting “single, fierce and independent!”, friends and family assume you’re sitting at home feeling sad with the cat (or without the cat, because the landlord won’t allow it).

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Majority of US abortions in 2020 were medication abortions, analysis finds

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The increase came as telehealth and mailing medication during the pandemic made healthcare accessible for vulnerable people

Medication abortion accounted for the majority of all abortions for the first time in US history in 2020, a new analysis by the Guttmacher Institute has shown.

Sometimes called the “abortion pill”, medication abortion is a two-drug treatment that is approved to terminate a pregnancy up to 10 weeks gestation or less. The drugs, sold under the brand name Mifeprex, have accounted for an increasingly large share of all abortions in the US since its introduction in 2000.

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‘Oh my God, I’m having sex again!’: Yellowjackets’ Melanie Lynskey on raunch, rage and the rise of Kate Winslet

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After 30 years of critical acclaim, the actor has finally found mainstream success at 44. She talks about Hollywood’s dangerous beauty standards, turning down misogynistic scripts – and why her TV show about possible teenage cannibals is so much fun

It would not surprise me if Melanie Lynskey had deliberately matched her pale blouse to the pale curtains behind her, and her pale complexion, the better to blend into the background. After 30 years of critical acclaim, but not mainstream fame, Lynskey is getting noticed and it feels very, very strange to her. Her show, Yellowjackets, has steadily become a hit. Lynskey is not quite the lead in this ensemble piece, but near enough, as one of four fortysomething women who survived a plane crash as teenagers, and went through some savage stuff, involving murder and almost certainly cannibalism.

Likened to a mix of Lord of the Flies, Lost and Mean Girls, with a pleasing amount of 90s nostalgia, it has become one of the most talked-about shows of the moment. “It’s funny to be on something that people are watching,” Lynskey says with a laugh. “It’s a different experience.”

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France extends abortion limit after year of parliamentary rows

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Applause in national assembly as lawmakers vote to extend limit for ending pregnancy from 12 to 14 weeks

France has extended its time limit for abortion after an epic battle in parliament, amid anger that thousands of women had to travel abroad each year to terminate pregnancies in countries such as the Netherlands, Spain or England because of French restrictions.

There was applause in the French national assembly on Wednesday when lawmakers voted definitively to extend the legal limit for ending a pregnancy from 12 to 14 weeks. France’s new time frame is still lower than in some other European countries, including England at 24 weeks.

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‘I feel free when I run’: the young women enjoying a sense of freedom in Iraq

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Displaced Iraqi girls stuck in camps are getting a taste of independence by running, hiking and kickboxing, thanks to a programme teaching them about sport and confidence

The mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan are edged with a tangerine glow as our minibus drives past them. We set off earlier from Erbil, the region’s capital, and are driving to Shaqlawa, a historic city about 50 minutes away, to hike up the nearby Safeen mountain. Inside the minibus, a group of teenage girls are playing their favourite songs.

The teenagers live with their families in one of Erbil’s two main camps for internally displaced people (IDPs), Baharka and Harsham, having fled Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, and surrounding towns such as Tal Afar and Sinjar, when the area was captured by ISISsis in 2014. The hike has been organised by Free to Run, an NGO that supports and empowers women and girls in regions of conflict through sport, offering them life-skills training, and creating safe spaces for them to develop confidence and friends, and to reclaim public space in a country where women’s rights are lacking.

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Ideas to change the world: Margaret Atwood talks to seven visionaries fighting for a brighter future

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The author’s hand-picked panel share their ideas on music, mushrooms, zombies and more

What do you get when you bring together some of the most revered thinkers, most progressive-minded activists and one of the most celebrated novelists writing today to discuss the immense challenges we face? A debate about the Spice Girls, of course! For the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, Margaret Atwood wanted to gather some of her favourite experts from around the globe, to ask how they see the world we live in – and what they believe is key to creating the future they want to see.

The lineup included bestselling author Raj Patel, dubbed the “rock star of social justice writing”; Senator Yvonne Boyer, the first Indigenous person appointed to the Canadian senate from Ontario; Akala, a writer, musician and poet; the excellently named Merlin Sheldrake, an expert on fungi; Kate Fletcher, whose speciality is sustainable fashion; Jessie Housty, a young Indigenous activist with a focus on decolonisation and community; and Yasmeen Hassan of Equality Now, which works to combat gender discrimination. The panel, hand-picked by Atwood, reflects the many disparate subjects the author is passionate about, and she was as keen to hear from them as they were to understand her vision and ideas.

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