The NGO Nana is upending gender norms in conservative Sokoto state, where one in 20 girls finish secondary school
The green-and-red Nana Female Mechanic Garage sign is visible from the main road into Sokoto city. Behind its sliding iron gate, Zainab Dayyabu stomps around in heavy work boots and a blue jumpsuit, her hands callused and oily.
“I love the job I’m doing,” says the 23-year-old, as she opens the bonnet of a Peugeot van to test its battery.
Continue reading...Campaign comes as figures show almost all expectant mothers hospitalised with coronavirus symptoms were unvaccinated
The UK government is warning that almost all pregnant women admitted to hospital with Covid symptoms were unvaccinated in one analysis over several months last year, as it kicks off an advertising campaign encouraging expectant mothers to get boosted.
The campaign is calling on pregnant women not to wait to get either their first, second or booster jab. It will highlight the risks of Covid-19 to mothers and babies, with testimonies of pregnant women who have had the vaccine to be broadcast on radio and social media.
Continue reading...Move to appoint Justice Ayesha Malik, who banned virginity tests for rape survivors, described as ‘defining moment’ for the country
Pakistan’s top judicial commission has nominated a female judge to the supreme court for the first time in the country’s history.
The move to pave the way for Justice Ayesha Malik to join the court has been widely praised by lawyers and civil society activists as a defining moment in the struggle for gender equality in Pakistan.
Continue reading...Decision to close public hammams – most people’s only chance for a warm wash – sparks anger in light of country’s mounting crises
The Taliban sparked outrage this week by announcing that women in northern Afghanistan would no longer be allowed to use communal bathhouses.
The use of bathhouses, or hammams, is an ancient tradition that remains for many people the only chance for a warm wash during the country’s bitterly cold winters.
Continue reading...Shaparak Khorsandi and Esther Manito both came of age during a time when women were expected to conform to male stereotypes. To reflect, they did what they do best: wrote comedy shows about it
When Shaparak Khorsandi’s teenage son recently discovered 90s music – the Shamen’s Ebeneezer Good, Pulp and more – he had questions for her. What did Jarvis Cocker mean when he sang “I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire?” Were they singing about ecstasy? Did she go raving, too?
Khorsandi was in her teens and 20s in the 1990s, and being swept along in ladette culture. Used by the lads’ mag FHM as early as 1994, “ladette” came to describe bolshie women who could out-party and out-gross any hardened lad. Sara Cox, Denise van Outen and Zoe Ball were the media favourites: often pictured binge-drinking and out on the town. Ladettes went hand-in-hand with 90s lad culture, where Britpop, banter and sport collided in a blizzard of hedonism. These “new lads”, posited one researcher, were retreating into a more simplistic masculinity in response to the Spice Girls’ concept of Girl Power; and middle-class boys were co-opting the dress and behaviours of working-class men.
Continue reading...The swapping, collating and posting of nude images of women without their consent is on the rise. But unlike revenge porn, it is not a crime. Now survivors are demanding a change in the law
Ruby will never forget the first time she clicked on the database AnonIB. It is a so-called “revenge porn” site and in January 2020, a friend had texted her for help. Ruby is a secondary school teacher, used to supporting teenagers, and her friend turned to her for advice when she discovered her images were on the site.
“She didn’t send the thread that she was on,” says Ruby, 29. “She was embarrassed, so she sent a general link to the site itself.” When Ruby opened it, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I couldn’t believe that such an infrastructure existed: something so well organised, so systematic, fed by the people who lived around us.”
Continue reading...Statue of Elena Cornaro Piscopia could go up in square in Padua that contains 78 statues all dedicated to men
A proposal to insert a statue of the first woman in the world to earn a PhD among the 78 dedicated to notable male figures on a prominent square in northern Italy has stirred controversy.
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia received her doctorate degree in philosophy from the University of Padua in 1678. But she was not included when Padua officials devised a project in the late 18th century to erect statues in Prato della Valle – the largest square in Italy – dedicated to illustrious historical figures who were either from the city or had links to it.
Continue reading...Government accused of remaining ‘scandalously’ silent on grim start to the year for women and girls
Feminist campaigners in France are calling for tougher government action to combat violence against women and girls after three women were allegedly killed by their current or former partner on the first day of 2022.
The body of a 28-year-old military recruit who had been stabbed to death was found near Saumur in western France on Saturday. The local prosecutor, Alexandra Verron, said a 21-year-old man, also a soldier, had been arrested and investigators were looking into a possible femicide – the killing of a woman by her partner or ex-partner.
Continue reading...Mary, 62, and Roy, 70, met in Michigan after she accidentally crashed her bike into his – and broke her jaw. They’re now married and live in St Louis
When Mary moved from Bedfordshire in the UK to Michigan in the US on a Fulbright scholarship in 1985, she wasn’t expecting to find love. Her mind was focused on the nutrition course she had enrolled on and her plans for a future career. In the spring of 1986, she was cycling home from a meeting with her tutor when she approached a fence covered in ivy. Roy, who had been pushing his bike, emerged from behind the fence before she had the chance to stop. “I hit his wheel and, because my hands were cold and I was wearing a backpack, I went sailing over the handlebars,” she remembers. “I landed on my chin and broke my jaw on the concrete.”
In typical British fashion, she told him she was “absolutely fine”, but Roy says it was clear she was badly hurt. “My apartment was pretty close by so I got my roommate to drive her to the university health centre,” he says. The next day, Mary had to have her jaw wired shut, meaning she couldn’t eat solid food for three months. “Roy came to my apartment with some juice to suck through a straw. He said that when my jaw was unwired he would make me dinner,” she recalls. Although it was an accident, Roy felt “terrible” about what happened. “I was really concerned about her,” he says.
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Continue reading...In one of the world’s most dangerous regions for environmental and human rights activists, La Siguata offers a safe space for women suffering trauma as a result of their work
A milky-white and sky-blue stone hangs from a red string around Ethels Correa’s neck, and every so often she rubs it between her fingers.
“When I feel anger, I grab this stone and I begin to relax, because they taught me how to breathe, to relax the body and to relax the mind,” she says. “I carry it with me all the time.”
Continue reading...She had been ‘catfished’ for years, and now her hit podcast tells the story of tracing the scammer and her quest for justice
The voice of Kirat Assi, subject of the podcast Sweet Bobby, is so familiar I momentarily forget we had never spoken, let alone met. I am one of the million-plus listeners gripped by her story of being “catfished” – duped into a relationship by someone with a false identity.
Assi, who lives in London, fell victim to a complex fraud that lasted eight years and involved up to 60 characters who only existed in the scammer’s warped imagination. At the centre was Bobby, a handsome cardiologist with whom Assi formed a close friendship that turned into romance despite never meeting in real life. Bobby was a real person whose identity had been stolen by the scammer, eventually exposed as Assi’s cousin Simran Bhogal.
Continue reading...Ukrainian Oksana Lyniv makes history with three-year posting at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale
A female conductor will take the helm at an Italian opera house for the first time in January.
The Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv said she was surprised to learn she was making history after receiving the offer from the Teatro Comunale opera house in Bologna. The 43-year-old begins the three-year posting as musical director on 22 January.
Continue reading...Handful of local administrations are among the first in west to offer arrangement to their employees
A handful of local administrations in Spain have become among the first in western Europe to offer menstrual leave to their employees, in an attempt to strike a better balance between workplace demands and period pains.
This year the Catalan city of Girona became the first in the country to consider flexible working arrangements for any employee experiencing discomfort due to periods. In June it announced a deal with its more than 1,300 municipal employees to allow women, trans men and non-binary individuals to take up to eight hours menstrual leave a month, with the caveat that any time used must be recovered within a span of three months.
Continue reading...Mahé Elipe captures the visceral anger as International Women’s Day protests turned into a violent clash with police
On 8 March 2021, women across the world took part in protests to mark International Women’s Day. In Mexico, there is an added poignancy to the annual event, as at least 10 women are murdered in the country each day; in 2021 the date was was marred by additional violence.
In the runup to the day fences were erected around the national palace in Mexico City’s main square, where thousands of women were due to gather.
Continue reading...Laali and Meenakshi’s unborn daughters are among the country’s 46 million ‘missing’ women and girls over the past 50 years
Laali was alone at home when she realised her legs were drenched in blood. The bleeding did not stop for eight hours. As she fell unconscious, the 25-year-old thought she would die alongside the foetus she was losing.
She had been three months pregnant when she was taken for prenatal sex determination. “When I learned it was a girl, I started feeling as though I was suffocating,” she says.
Continue reading...Texan lawyer and Linda Coffee won landmark 1973 case, safeguarding right now under threat from US supreme court
Sarah Weddington, an attorney who argued and won the Roe v Wade supreme court case which established the right to abortion in the US, has died aged 76.
Susan Hays, a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced the news on Twitter on Sunday and the Dallas Morning News confirmed it.
Continue reading...From jellyfish in the Caribbean to hypothermia in the English Channel, swimming hasn’t been easy for Chloë McCardel – but can feel ‘so wild and free’
We’re not off to a good start. I’m fumbling with my cap, the rubber clinging to my head lopsidedly, my hair straggling out. I take it off to start again and the woman who has swum the fickle English Channel more times than any other human, the “Queen of the Channel”, instructs me in how to correctly apply a swimming cap.
Chloë McCardel and I are going for an ocean swim at Bondi. She dives into the foamy sea ahead of me – more slender mermaid than broad-shouldered Amazonian. Knee deep, I feel the current suck at my flesh. It’s not one of Bondi’s better days. Chest deep, I realise I’m being dragged out and my very amateur ocean-swimming abilities are no match for this surf. Panic rises. McCardel is an impatient white-cap in the distance. What was I thinking, suggesting a swim with superwoman?
Continue reading...Our 20 favourite pieces of the year
After growing up in a Zimbabwe convulsed by the legacy of colonialism, when I got to Oxford I realised how many British people still failed to see how empire had shaped lives like mine – as well as their own
Continue reading...Donor profiles sparked long conversations about the values we wanted for our child. The guys who wanted to ‘spread their genes’? Definitely out
Surrounded by glittering Christmas lights, in between sips of red wine, my friend made me a very decent proposal. “My sperm,” he said. “You can have it if you like.” We’d been catching up over festive drinks and the topic of kids came up, as it does when you are in your 30s. My partner – now wife – and I had started thinking about having a family, I’d told my friend. We had two wombs and a bunch of eggs; we just needed to figure out the rest of the baby-making equation. So he offered to sort that bit out for us, no strings (or body appendages) attached.
My wife and I thought about that offer a lot over the next few months. No offence to heterosexuals (some of my best friends are straight), but I don’t envy you most of the time. However, I am jealous of the fertile straight couples who don’t have to do anything more complicated than jump into bed when they decide they want kids. Instead of getting undressed, my wife and I went online. We researched, researched, researched. Should we go for a known donor such as my friend? Or would it be better to go to a sperm bank?
Continue reading...‘It has to be recognised as a term and as a crime’, says government opposition, after unprecedented number of women murdered by partners
The Greek government has come under growing pressure to introduce femicide as an offence in the country’s penal code amid outrage over the growing and unprecedented number of women being brutally murdered by their partners.
Two women were murdered by their husbands within five days last week, bringing the death toll to 17 since January, according to state-run television. Both men allegedly told police that they had killed their wives out of fear that they would leave them.
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