#ThanksForTyping is not a practice that’s confined to academics. A considerable portion of the western canon is built on the unpaid labour of women. So here’s my top ten list of the male writers who thanked – or failed to thank – their long-suffering wives.
https://theconversation.com/thanksfortyping-the-women-behind-famous-male-writers-75770
On March 27, the Sexual Offences Act finally passed into Irish law. The activists involved in its passage, including myself, had pressed for this law for anything between six and 10 years.
Here I was, on my way to deliver a public speech about the new dawn of women’s rights in our country, on International Women’s Day, and all I could think about was the women who were dead because they had no rights, or because their rights were seen not to matter, or, more to the point, because the rights of men to unfettered sexual access to women’s bodies had been tacitly approved for so many centuries in my country that we’ll never be able to count our women and girls who’ve died in the service of it.
We hear, over and over, about the shockingly high homicide rate in prostitution, and we should be shocked at a homicide rate that’s been recorded at 40 times the national average, but the truth is that homicide deaths in prostitution are only the tip of the iceberg. Suicide has also been found to be a significant consequence of prostitution, and every death in my circle was a result of drug overdose, cirrhosis of the liver or cervical cancer. There is also, of course, HIV. These ways that prostituted women die, taken together, outstrip the homicide rate by many, many times.
Members of the Republic of Ireland women’s football team have threatened to go on strike after accusing their governing body of failing to provide the team adequate support, including being forced to get changed in public toilets on the way to matches and sharing tracksuits with youth-team squads.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/apr/04/republic-ireland-women-strike?
Not content with being ranked 1st in the world as the most gender equal country in the world and unwilling to accept a seven percent pay gap.
Nope, the Nordic utopia will not rest until gender equity is achieved.
The latest proof lies in a bill introduced in Iceland’s parliament on Tuesday to mandate equal pay by asking employers to prove they pay men and women equally.
If passed, and given it enjoys support from both major parties (envy again!) it’s likely, it will require public and private businesses to demonstrate they offer equal pay.
https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/iceland-to-make-companies-prove-they-pay-men-and-women-equally/
The gender pay gap in Australia will be exacerbated by the position the federal government has taken with respect to increasing the minimum wage, according to the Australian Lawyers for Human Rights (ALHR).
The group has expressed concern about aspects of the government submission which shares the view that most low-wage jobs are temporary. Adopting the view that poorly paid work is temporary overlooks key groups, such as middle-aged women, single mothers and migrant women who experience less wage progression on the whole, the ALHR said.
“The government’s misplaced assumptions about the transitory nature of low-paid work totally ignore the gendered nature of employment mobility and systemic discrimination that women may face.”
A survey of thousands is set to unveil widespread instances of sexual harassment on campuses but students will not find out how bad the problem is on their campus after the Australian Human Rights Commission said it would not publicly release data on individual universities.
The decision to not publicly release each university’s incident figures comes despite many university leaders acknowledging privately that releasing such data would be the most effective catalyst for change. Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins said she would”encourage universities to release their own figures”.
“To me, fighting surrogacy, it’s part of fighting the patriarchy,” Terragni said. “For thousands of years the patriarchy has tried to reduce women to livestock for reproduction, and this is a newer, more extreme form of it.”
Terragni explained that as a feminist activist she supports “the affirmation of feminine difference,” or the idea that women have a more central role in reproduction than men and that this primacy needs to be cherished and protected. “It’s something that the patriarchy has tried to take away from women, from the days of Aristotle, who described women’s wombs just as containers for semen.”
It’s because of this “affirmation of feminine difference” that she supports sperm donation for single women and lesbian couples, but opposes surrogacy.
It is a travesty that women are still facing blatant discrimination upon falling pregnant, giving birth or returning to work.
Aside from women working in lower paying industries, the fact that more women work part-time and take time out of the workforce to care for children, are all reasons why we have a gender pay gap.
https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/eds-blog/talitha-cummins-tracey-spicer-and-monty-faced-pregnancy-discrimination/
https://womensagenda.com.au/leadership/advice/how-i-respond-to-sexist-attitudes/
https://womensagenda.com.au/uncategorised/the-pay-gap-explained/
Like the Abortion Law Reform (Miscellaneous Acts Amendment) Bill 2016 introduced last year by Dr Mehreen Faruqi, the Summary Offences Amendment (Safe Access to Reproductive Health Clinics) Bill 2017, introduced in the NSW Legislative Council by the Hon Penny Sharpe MLC on Thursday creates safe access zones of 150 metres around abortion clinics. However, the Bill introduced by Dr Faruqi goes further and also includes provisions to finally decriminalise abortion in NSW and requiring doctors to refer patients on if they themselves have a conscientious objection to abortion.
A new row has broken out over the so-called tampon tax after it emerged that a quarter of a million pounds from a controversial levy on women’s sanitary products is to be given to an anti-abortion organisation.
Under pressure from campaigners after failing to honour a pledge to scrap the 5% VAT on sanitary products, former chancellor George Osborne said that more than £10m a year would be redistributed from the tax receipts to women’s charities.
But there was consternation on Saturday night among women’s groups and politicians who had campaigned on the issue after it emerged that £250,000 of that money is going to Life, a charity that campaigns against abortion and has been at the centre of controversy over the information provided by a network of unregulated pregnancy counselling centres.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/01/tampon-tax-anti-abortion-group-anger
