Resistance to viewing women as a homogenous block can all too often provide politicians with an excuse to ignore women altogether. Women hold half the electorate’s voting power: which party will be brave enough to reach out for their vote at the next General Election?
Religion is back in public space, and the thesis that modernization means the privatization of religion has been seriously questioned. Some religious and feminist dogmas need re-examination. What do ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ or ‘feminist’ mean in today’s contexts?
The Australian Prime Minister's recent speech about “repulsive double standards on misogyny and sexism” in the House of Representatives has recast the debate about gender prejudice in politics. Even if most its arch-custodians didn't notice, says Zoe Holman.
The Tunisian experience with state feminism is a model to draw lessons from, especially for the Arab-Muslim countries whether governed by liberal autocratic regimes or Islamist regimes: whenever the regime talks in favour of women, read between the lines.
Alarm about the declining ratio of girls to boys in the Indian population, evidence of a particularly lethal form of gender discrimination, has overshadowed the more positive trend that is emerging in neighbouring Bangladesh where the ‘aversion to daughters’ seems to be weakening
Meredith Tax raises significant questions about feminist activism, political alliances and fundamentalism, but her attack on Code Pink's campaign trip against the use of remotely-controlled drones in Pakistan is misplaced, says Rebecca Johnson.
A lenient gang-rape verdict has prompted outcry and a debate on France's inadequate response to rape. The French media's ambivalence towards rape victims also needs to be examined, says Valeria Costa-Kostritsky
Myths of human survival that evade questions of gender, race and social relations, won’t help us adapt in a world already being radically reshaped by environmental disasters and slow burning climate change, argues Agnes Woolley
Is the 21st century woman someone who doesn't have to choose between a career and kids, but is doomed to spend hours in the gym so she can climb that ladder? While the UN celebrated the first International Day of the Girl, Kirsty Styles heard Catherine Hakim on the power of erotic capital
The real surprise was that President Obama explained why so-called "women's issues" are everyone's issues - college students, health care, medicare, social security and equal pay for women and men. He reminded people that women are more than the sum of their reproductive organs; they are workers a
Jobs are disappearing in the UK, wages are dropping, and there is a shocking absence of political debate about the changing nature of work and the disappearance of full-time secure employment.
The publication of topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, and the backlash it evoked, reveal an uneasy and gendered understanding of privacy in British, French and other countries' media, that the oldest tactics are still deployed to humiliate women, and how life in the public sphere is filte
