Category: Inequity

Olympic star Mary Peters charges into trans athletes row

Olympic gold medal winner Mary Peters has become the latest sporting icon to raise doubts about transgender athletes taking part in competitions against women.

Lady Peters, who won gold in the women’s pentathlon at the 1972 Olympics, said she did not agree that “people who had changed their gender” and still had high levels of the sex hormone testosterone “could compete on equal terms” with biological women.

Source: Olympic star Mary Peters charges into trans athletes row | News | The Sunday Times

French council fined for having too many female managers

A district council in eastern France has been fined €90,000 (£81,000) for appointing too many women to its management team in breach of public-sector gender parity laws.

Public institutions are usually fined for failing to meet the statutory 40 per cent quota of women in top jobs under a 2012 parity law. This is the first time a state body is known to have been penalised for appointing more than 60 per cent women to senior positions. Few employers were aware that the maximum limit could apply to women as well as men.

Jean-François Debat, the chairman of the Bourg-en-Bresse council, is unapologetic. “I think it’s comical to be punished for this reason,” he said. “Not only do I stand by our appointments, I’m proud of having so many women in our management teams.”

Source: French council fined for having too many female managers

A dark day for Malaysia

This is a dark day for Malaysia, says Sisters in Islam executive director Rozana Isa (photo, below) in response to a High Court decision which has upheld the fatwa against the organisation.

The judgement represents a dark day not only for SIS but also for Muslim women in Malaysia. For over three decades, SIS has been carrying the voices of women from the ground to decision-makers and policymakers. Despite the fatwa, SIS remain instrumental in informing laws and conducting programs that continue to improve the lives of millions of women in Malaysia.

SIS has helped over 10,000 women and men through our Telenisa service – a free legal helpline which remains the only non-judgemental and rights-based advisory service for Islamic Family and Syariah Laws in Malaysia today.

Among other issues championed by SIS include ending child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM), promoting gender equality in Muslim marriages and Islamic Family Laws, and taking a stance against gender-based violence and moral policing.

Source: A dark day for Malaysia

Bangladesh: Court removes ‘virgin’ word from marriage form

Women in Bangladesh are no longer required to declare if they are virgins on marriage registration forms, the country’s top court has ruled.

The high court ordered that “virgin” be replaced with “unmarried”. The other two options on the form – “widow” and “divorced” – remain unchanged.

Women’s rights groups – who had argued the word “virgin” was humiliating – welcomed Sunday’s verdict.

Source: Bangladesh: Court removes ‘virgin’ word from marriage form – BBC News

Centrelink ‘couples rule’ putting domestic violence survivor at risk

Centrelink is using evidence of domestic violence as proof women are in legitimate relationships, linking their access to welfare to their abusers’ wealth.

A report by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) has found Centrelink struggles to distinguish between genuine relationships and cases of abuse, and uses inappropriate information (including police and hospital records) to determine whether or not survivors are part of a couple.

Under legislation, people in couples are assessed on not only their income and assets, but those of their partner too.

Dr Sleep called for the Social Security Act 1991 to be amended to explicitly include domestic violence as a consideration when determining whether or not to apply the couples rule.

Source: Centrelink ‘couples rule’ putting domestic violence survivor at risk

Jane Caro: Why Cashless Welfare Cards Are A Slap In The Face

It is the good girls of my generation, the girls who did as they were told and put other people’s needs ahead of their own, who have ended up facing financial disaster.

It’s pretty simple to work out why if you bother to think about it. These are the women who left work to care for their children and who returned to the workforce part-time so they could continue to put their families first. If anyone in the family had a disability, guess who left work to care for them? And when parents grew frail and needed care, it was also daughters who were expected to step up. And what was happening to their superannuation while they took time out to care for others? Not a lot. That is why women retire with an average of half the super of men and fully one-third of us leave the workforce with no super at all.

Source: Jane Caro: Why Cashless Welfare Cards Are A Slap In The… | 10 daily

Women aren’t better multi-taskers than men — they’re just doing more work

Public opinion persists that women have a biological edge as super-efficient multitaskers. But, as this study shows, this myth is not supported by evidence.

Source: Women aren’t better multi-taskers than men — they’re just doing more work – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

How to drive cultural change to shift stubborn gender roles

KPMG’s 2018 report The Cost of Coming Back: Achieving a Better Deal for Working Mothers found that it would cost some professionally qualified working mums almost $30 a day in tax, lost payments and out-of-pocket childcare expenses to increase their working days from three to four per week.

Other working mothers would lose almost $80 a day by moving from four to five days per week of work. Outcomes like this are at odds with the Government’s intention to boost women’s workforce participation as part of increasing our national productivity.

It is also worth considering whether Australia should follow the UK and various other countries who have introduced laws or codes banning sexism in advertising.

In June, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority banned ads that feature gender stereotypes (such as men lying around while women do all the cleaning or women having difficulty parking the car), following a report that found that gender-stereotypical imagery and rhetoric “can lead to unequal gender outcomes in public and private aspects of people’s lives.”

Source: How to drive cultural change to shift stubborn gender roles