Women

Choosing the way that one dresses is a pivotal human right.   For any woman, choosing the way that one dresses is a pivotal human right. In both the US and Israel, we pride ourselves in the fact that a woman can dress however she pleases, regardless of whether it is Western, traditional Jewish, traditional […]

A couple of weeks ago, Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology issued its proposed amendments to the Protection of Women Against Violence Bill of 2015. They recommend husbands to “lightly beat” their wives in certain circumstances.

In around 350 days’ time, the year 2015 will begin. But, erm, shouldn’t we rather still be remarking that we’ve just celebrated the start of 2014? The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have a target achievement date of 2015. Which is next year. Once you consider it’s been over 4,800 days since world leaders adopted the […]

Should those (mostly women) who do not participate in the labor market, instead remaining at home to look after the house and raise children, receive compensation for their work? It’s a thorny issue which is as divisive as it is complex. In the final referendum of 2013, Swiss voters were asked to share their opinion […]

Aid, donations and relief supplies are making their way to the parts of the Philippines most affected by the recent disaster. A conference held earlier this week in London and attended by high-level representatives of governments, U.N. agencies and NGOs, wasn’t directly focused on responding to the “relief gridlock” and misery riddling the lives of many […]

You may have heard of the U.N., but have you ever heard of UNRISD? Perhaps not – as a research institute they aren’t going to grab as many headlines as the WHO, UNESCO or the Security Council. Yet the work they do is just as valuable, the latest example being a new program exploring when […]

Crystal balls, horse-drawn carts, headscarves and tarot cards. If we were playing a word-association game, what group of people would spring to mind? If your brain is leaning toward ‘gypsy’ then you get a point. In Europe, gypsy is a common way of describing Roma and travellers; however, this fairground fairytale image of a freewheeling […]

Depending on how you are dressed, you can signal your status, identity, job and a myriad other markers which help locate you in a sociopolitical context. They can show your distinctiveness, or membership within a group. Many jobs require a uniform, from the armed forces to hospitals to customer services, and in many countries around […]

Sex trafficking. It happens all over the world but is largely invisible to most. What The Whistleblower (a drama, not a documentary) does is expose it as it occurred in Bosnia in 1999, four years after the Dayton Accord was reached. Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Nebraska who joins the United […]

When the moon hits your eye like’a big pizza pie…that’s amore. Substitute “moon” for “man” and “that’s amore” for a significant proportion of Italian women. Exact figures on domestic violence are unknown for obvious reasons, but the more troubling occurrence of women being murdered is also not noted in official statistics. At least 127 women […]

Back in May I wrote about the derisively named “storm in a teacup” over the decision of the Bank of England to remove reformer Elizabeth Fry from the £5 note. Why this was controversial to some was that it meant that no women, apart from the monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, would appear on paper currency […]

In which sector of the economy are women disproportionately (over)represented? And even though they are in the majority, still get paid less than their male counterparts? There may of course be more than one answer to these questions, however for the purposes of this blog post, the one I’m going with is “the informal economy,” […]