Flemish film awards under fire after men win most prestigious gender-neutral categories

The Flemish film and television awards are facing calls to temporarily do away with gender-neutral categories amid concerns that the switch has left women routinely shut out of the top awards.

At the Ensors awards on Saturday male actors cleaned up the categories for best lead and supporting actors. It was an echo of 2022 – the first year that the awards ceremony axed gendered categories – when men also walked away with each of the four awards recognising the best actors.

The results prompted calls to temporarily revert back to the traditional format.

Source: Flemish film awards under fire after men win most prestigious gender-neutral categories

Craig Kelly aide found guilty of indecent assaults

An aide who managed the electoral office of ex-MP Craig Kelly has been convicted of indecently assaulting four female staff members in their late teens and early 20s.

Francesco Zumbo manipulated his young employees, pressuring them into “kisses and cuddles”, touching them inappropriately and exposing himself to one victim.

The 56-year-old was convicted at Sydney’s Downing Centre Local Court on Friday for crimes that occurred at various locations across the city from 2014-2018.

Multiple complainants say the former aide would greet them with hugs and kisses in the office, conduct that escalated to him groping their breasts or touching their bottoms.

One woman said her boss exposed his penis to her while they were on a park bench, while another said he touched her vagina while they were pulled over in his car by the roadside.

Covertly recorded conversations showed the officer manager repeatedly saying he was in love with, attracted to and wanted to become intimate with the women, the magistrate said.

These discussions were one-sided and Zumbo would not take no for an answer, questioning his staffers’ loyalty and pulling them into lengthy rants if they rejected his attempts at intimacy.

Source: Craig Kelly aide found guilty of indecent assaults

Outrage after Australian news channel uses doctored image of woman MP

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The doctored image of Victorian upper house MP Georgie Purcell appeared on a Nine News bulletin on Monday night after she criticised the government’s decision to reject a ban on duck hunting.

Ms Purcell, the youngest woman in Victoria’s parliament, posted the original and the doctored image on social media X to call out the news channel.

“I endured a lot yesterday,” the Animal Justice Party member wrote, adding: “But having my body and outfit photoshopped by a media outlet was not on my bingo card.”

“Note the enlarged boobs and outfit to be made more revealing. Can’t imagine this happening to a male MP,” she said.

Nine News apologised following the outrage, blaming AI for “automation by Photoshop”.

Source: Outrage after Australian news channel uses doctored image of woman MP

Pay gap transparency to benefit women, men and companies

From next month, workers around Australia will find out if there is a gender pay gap in their workplace.

Experts say the change is necessary for progress to be made.

The Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) will publish the gender pay gaps for every Australian employer with 100 or more employees on February 27.

The findings will be available to the public on WGEA’s Data Explorer.

“Pay secrecy basically holds down wages for women,” she said.

“We know that gender pay gap actually applies within organisations where men in jobs with similar skills requirements … do earn more, and if that’s not known … that gives people less capacity to actually challenge that.”

The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates the gender pay gap is 13 per cent.

Meanwhile, WGEA found the average total remuneration gender pay gap, which encompasses all employee types including part-time and casual workers, sits at 21.7 per cent.

This means women in Australia are earning an average of $26,393 less per year than men.

Women are also set to retire with a much smaller nest egg than men, with 2023 research by The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work finding women earn $136,000 less in superannuation over their working lives than their male counterparts.

Lower pay and smaller retirement savings could be a factor behind women aged over 55 being one of the fastest-growing homeless demographics in the country.

Australian women spend 81 per cent more time doing unpaid domestic and care work than men, Centre for Future Work found.

Source: Pay gap transparency to benefit women, men and companies

‘Woke’ civil service issues staggering new transgender guidance |UK

New transgender guidance has been branded as “woke” as civil servants have been told to “think” of transgender colleagues as women.

New policies issued by watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, implies that calling employees by their preferred pronoun is not enough.

According to advice, staff can show their support for trans colleagues by “thinking of the person as being the gender that they want you to think of them as.”

It also claims that transgender women – those who are born male – go through the menopause.

Source: ‘Woke’ civil service issues staggering new transgender guidance

Police officer forced to strip down to her underwear wins £800,000 in discrimination case | UK

A former firearms officer who was forced to strip down to her underwear during training has won over £800,000 in a sex discrimination case against West Midlands Police.

Detective Inspector Rebecca Kalam was subject to sexual harassment and discrimination while working for the police force.

An employment tribunal heard she was stripped down  down to her underwear during a training exercise so first aid could be given. The scenario was based on a bullet hole on the top of her left breast, which officers would then have to treat, and this left her feeling “extremely uncomfortable”.

On another occasion she was told “just because you have t*ts does not mean you cannot do a press-up” as an officer pushed down on her neck with their foot.

The 40-year-old was one of only seven women in a firearms team with 250 men and faced a “toxic and discriminatory” culture.

Source: Police officer forced to strip down to her underwear wins £800,000 in discrimination case

Australians will finally see how men and women are paid in the workplace

Federal laws passed in March require the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to release data for private businesses with more than 100 employees – which covers about 5 million workers – from February 27 and for Commonwealth public sector employees next year.

While the agency has been collecting this data for almost a decade, until now it has published only anonymised information about industry sectors. In the first release, the agency will publish employer gender pay gaps by median as well as the gender composition and average remuneration per pay quartile of every large company.

Australians will finally be able to see how men and women are paid in the workplace.

Wooldridge, chief executive at the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, hopes holding businesses to account will spur them to meaningfully address the gender pay gap, which has fallen to 13 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/australians-will-finally-see-how-men-and-women-are-paid-in-the-workplace-20231215-p5erqb.html

 

Who will benefit most from the stage three tax cuts? Wealthy, older men

There’s no getting around it, it’s wealthy, older men who will benefit most from the stage three tax cuts.

Costings from the Parliamentary Budget Office show that by 2032-33, men will get $160 billion from the cuts, while women will get $82.9 billion.

Largely, this is because the people who are going to benefit most from the tax cuts are high income earners, and men are much more likely to earn higher incomes in Australia. Australia still has a significant gender pay gap. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency recently released its update to the average total remuneration pay gap between men and women, with it sitting at 21.7 per cent in 2023.

A report, published in February last year by the Australia Institute shows that men are set to benefit twice as much as women from the stage 3 tax cuts.

While women get 33 per cent of the tax cut, men get 67 per cent of the tax cut. This means that for every $1 of the tax cut that women get men get $2.

Source: Who will benefit most from the stage three tax cuts? Wealthy, older men

OpenAI’s refreshed board needs women fast

As Sam Altman returns to the CEO post at OpenAI following one of the most high-profile oustings in tech history, the shakeup also sees an all-male board replacing the previous board.

The only two board members to go this week were the two women, including Australian Helen Toner, who specialises in AI safety.

There are suggestions the previous board was split between “accelerants” of AI — those who want to see it developed and deployed quickly — and “decelerationists”, which include those who believe AI should be more slowly developed and with stronger safety mechanisms in place.

The “decelerationists” in this scenario are now gone from the board. Altman is back at the helm, with the board currently falling strongly into the accellerant camp.

Helen Toner had been on the OpenAI board for two years until this Wednesday. Still in her thirties, she is a University of Melbourne graduate who has made a career studying AI and is the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. When initially appointed to the board, Altman described her as bringing an “understanding of the global AI landscape with an emphasis on safety, which is critical for our efforts and mission.” Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that a paper Toner co-authored with CSET and published in October had been a point of discussion between Altman and Toner, with the paper criticising OpenAI for releasing ChatGPT at the end of 2022 for sparking a predicted tech race of sorts, and leading competitors to “accelerate or circumvent internal safety and ethics review processes.”

Getting women on the board of OpenAI to support its future will be essential, along with getting more diversity generally involved. And it must happen fast, given how quickly AI is evolving, especially thanks to OpenAI.

The underrepresentation of women in AI remains a key concern internationally, given rapid advances in AI over the past two years and how quickly the tech is and will continue to disrupt industries and those who work within them. Plenty of examples also show the consequences of bias being embedded in AI, which may have been reduced if there had been more — or at least some — diversity in the teams developing the tech.

Currently, just 12 per cent of AI researchers globally are women, according to stats from the United Nations, while just 20 per cent of employees in technical roles in machine learning companies are female. One area where women do dominate in AI is the ethics space.

On Thursday, news emerged from Reuters of a letter from OpenAI staff researchers to their previous board warning about an AI discovery they believed could threaten humanity. The letter was provided days before Altman was fired.

Source: OpenAI’s refreshed board needs women fast

We won’t get real equality until we price breastmilk, and treat breastfeeding as work

The Australian Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce delivered a major report last month drawing attention to what it called the “motherhood penalty” – the 55% cut in earnings for Australian women in the first five years after having a child.

The report makes many good recommendations, including extending paid parental leave to 52 weeks and providing universal high-quality affordable early childhood education.

Yet it mentions “birth” only twice, and “breastfeeding” not at all.

Women everywhere do disproportionate amounts of unpaid or informal work, meaning they generally work longer hours and have less time for rest and leisure than men.

The approach the Taskforce report adopts is a standard one to “recognise, reduce, and redistribute” the care work done by women.

But in a paper just published in Frontiers in Public Health we argue that breastfeeding is different from other care work: it can’t be redistributed, and shouldn’t be reduced.

We contend that breastfeeding ought to be recognised as a special category of “sexed” care work that should be supported rather than reduced or reallocated to others. We argue that to undermine women’s breastfeeding is profoundly sexist.

At present, a drop in breastfeeding rates that leads to increased commercial formula sales is counted as an increase in measured GDP – making it look as if it has made society better off. The cost to women’s health, children’s health and development and the environment is ignored.

The Mothers’ Milk Tool developed at the Australian National University is a step toward counting breastfeeding in the national food supply, as Norway does, and making it easy to calculate the value of the milk mothers and countries produce in gross domestic product (GDP).

The contribution that women make through breastfeeding is important. Brushing it under the carpet as part of a drive for equality in paid work harms them, their children and society more generally.

Source: We won’t get real equality until we price breastmilk, and treat breastfeeding as work