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On Pill popping

7 Jun

Over the last ten years or so,  “fertility” to many of my female friends, colleagues and wider circle of acquaintances has often been about encouraging the arrival of babies,  rather than preventing them.

Inadvertently, I’ve become familiar with words and phrases like IVF, surrogacy, Clomid, cervical mucus and the like.  Although two-thirds of British women in the 20-24 age group take the Pill, when you’re in your 40s (or even in your late 30s),  you tend not to do so, either by virtue of your age (and weight, or smoking status) or because you actively want to have children and so popping a daily pill from its little multi-coloured blister pack is an act from the past.

In series one of iconic TV show “Mad Men”,  there’s a scene where ambitious Peggy,  newly working in Manhattan and determined to be independent,  goes to see a doctor (who smokes throughout her examination – another example of how this visually stunning TV show uses props to invoke a sense of time, place and era) in order to obtain the Pill.

It’s the early 1960s and,  for the first time, there are doctors who will provide (unmarried) girls like Peggy with the tool to free them from their fertility.

I’m nearly as old as the Pill,  a fact of which I was reminded by this article in the weekend’s Observer,  which celebrates the Pill’s 50th birthday and reminds us of how far we’ve come since Peggy’s day. How about this quote?

“Well into the 1970s, women in Britain and America were still pretending to be married in order to get a prescription; some used to pass around the same battered wedding ring in the doctor’s waiting room.”

And as novelist Margaret Drabble comments:

“I think I would have had a child a year if I hadn’t started taking it.”

So, happy golden birthday to the Pill, an iconic symbol of late 20th century autonomy for women.

So are we tiptoeing towards quotas in the UK?

3 Jun

“Slowly, slowly, we approach the nervous foal with our hand out,  proffering a sugar lump,  or perhaps a chunk of carrot,  walking softly and gently on the balls of our feet so as not to startle him, speaking in a low, gentle, moderated voice so as not to cause him to veer up, startled and afraid”.

[As I'm sure David Attenborough never said].

But this approach is how these proposed new regulations from the Financial Reporting Council read,  when the nod towards the foal is so small as to be almost invisible – here’s the wording (my use of bold,  their use of underline):

“To encourage boards to be well balanced and avoid “group think” there are new principles on the composition and selection of the board, including the need to appoint members on merit, against objective criteria, and with due regard for the benefits of diversity, including gender diversity.”

And as Andrew Hill commented in the FT:

“it’s hard to understand why some companies feel threatened by the Financial Reporting Council’s decision to insist on annual re-election of boards and to nod, gently, towards gender diversity.”

Well, quite.

I await further media revelations as to which companies feel “threatened” and why … and what their share prices look like, too.

Gender parity achieved!

6 Apr

The Easter break means that I’m a little late to this story,  but I’m sharing it as a late April fool anyhow – nice work on Thursday 1st April,  Catalyst.

Ah well – it’s always good to aspire, right?

On laptops for children

1 Apr

You know that something’s really made an impact on you when it lodges in the brain and sticks with you for years, don’t you?  My “brainworm” is about the One Laptop Per Child project and I was delighted to see an update on their progress in the Sunday paper.

In October 2006,  I attended the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society in Deauville,  northern France – a three day conference attended by women from all over the world who come together annually to discuss how to further women’s participation in business and in life.  

One of the (many, many) lunchtime events featured a speaker from OLPC,  then a project in its relative infancy.  Her name was Mary Jo and she talked about the goals of the project – at its core, to create and then provide a basic laptop for under privileged children to use as an educational tool.

(Now further refined as  “… to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children via a “rugged low-cost, low-power laptop” – “)

As if it were yesterday,  I remember sitting in that conference room, eating rubber chicken (yes, even in France) and listening to Mary Jo tell us  how computer access could transform the lives and the educational prospects of children in developing countries, how the laptop model on which they were working would be super robust, have an extra long battery life, come pre-loaded with all types of educational and games based software;  how it would have a special anti-glare screen (on which this lady had herself been working, with Intel) so that it could be used outside and yet still be visible in bright sunshine, and how it would eventually be part of a giant hub of wireless enabled laptops so that the children could access the internet.

And the price of this bit of kit?

$100, in 2006.

I’ve kept an eye on the One Laptop website since then and watched their evolution,  but Sunday’s Observer article really brought home their three-plus years of progress. Follow the link and see for yourself what a difference it’s making to the children of Rwanda and how 1.4 million laptops (not quite yet at that magical $100 each price point, but they’re getting there) have already been rolled out to children in 35 countries which include Haiti, Afghanistan, Brazil and Uruguay.

One of the best days on my recent trip to Goa was when I took my own laptop out to Rainbow House with me.  One of the other volunteers had shared her photos of the school’s sports day, and I thought the children might like to see some of the pictures.  I set myself and the laptop up on the verandah,  booted up the photos – and within seconds I was completely covered in children,  swarming over me and the computer,  completely fascinated by the screen and the images.  They played with it until the battery died and absolutely loved looking at the photos and playing games – so I can completely see how it, as a piece of technology,  does serve so many purposes for children everywhere: it makes learning fun,  it’s a new gadget and it’s a unifying tool.  As the article suggests:

“…computers can enable children to learn how to learn for themselves through playful problem-solving and that this will lead to their becoming better-rounded human beings.”

Victory for PinkStinks!

27 Mar

As my friend CJ would say, it’s “very pleasing”  to see that PinkStinks’s campaign against supermarket giant Sainsbury’s has been successful; thousands of children’s dressing-up outfits have now been cleared from shelves after complaints (via a PinkStinks co-ordinated campaign) that they promote sexist stereotypes.

As reported here in the Daily Telegraph, Sainsbury’s (“Try something new today!” – indeed …) were merrily selling nurses’ outfits “for girls” and doctors’ kits labelled “for boys”, along with pilot and “superhero” costumes – but these have now been removed and will be replaced with a new range of gender neutral dressing up outfits.

Nice work, PinkStinks – and a great testimony to the strength of their pester power social media campaign (which I joined even though I don’t have children myself, let alone daughters or even nieces).

Whenever I hear stories like this, or read about manufacturers and retailers unwittingly promoting gender and/or inappropriate messaging and stereotypes (wasn’t it Woolworths – RIP – who hit the headlines a few years ago for launching a range of pink painted bedroom furniture aimed at little girls named the “Lolita”?), I remind myself of a small boy called John and how invidious and impactful gender images can be. 

John is the son of a female friend who works as a GP; she is evidently from a very smart family, because her sister is also a doctor. One day, returning home from a visit to his aunt’s house, where my friend and her sister had been talking medical shop, John, then aged five, asked his mother:

“Mummy – when I grow up, can I become a doctor too, or is it only ladies who are allowed to do that?”

More on IWD … and the continuing global gender gap

11 Mar

And so to the House of Commons, to celebrate International Women’s Day with the Plan team, assorted MPs, the Royal African Society and Plan’s supporters.

On the way there,  I read the Mirror’s IWD supplement,  guest edited by Sarah Brown; on the way home, I saw that President Obama had also celebrated IWD at the White House; both huge, mainstream improvements on the way in which IWD is now globally recognised and acknowledged.

Chaired by Labour MP Sally Keeble, the event was about celebrating IWD, discussing women’s issues in Africa and highlighting the impact of women on economic empowerment. I sat at the back of the room and scribbled,  so saw a lot of backs rather than the speakers and their associated slides – but here’s what I heard …

Plan CEO Marie Staunton (a really fabulous speaker and such an impassioned advocate for girls and women) opened up the debate with the statement that “Girls are invisible” – their work is unseen, taken for granted, doesn’t count,  doesn’t contribute to GDP – and yet where would many societies be without it? And, in a recession,  girls suffer more than boys: they are more likely to be pulled out of school early in order to contribute to the family income,  with all the future repercussions of that (outlined here,  at the launch of Plan’s “Because I am a Girl” book in January). 

But,  continued Marie, each year of completed primary school  adds an additional 10% onto an adult girl’s future earnings; and girls who go on to complete a full ten years’ worth of education are more likely to have smaller families and break the cycle of poverty.  Plan are tracking 142 girls in 9 countries and these preliminary findings add a huge amount of value to their work overseas, as do insights such as learning that girls who are menstruating and have no sanitary protection can’t go to school – so something as relatively simple as providing them with sanitary towels can have a massive impact on their capacity to gain an education, recognise their rights, gain a voice and empower their communities.

A speaker (I unfortunately missed her name – Tipi …?) from Comic Relief told us that the charity has a specific programme funding women and girls, and that their research has shown that,  “when women and girls prosper, communities thrive.”

Focussing on education, anti-violence campaigns and women’s issues (such as programmes which emphasise the benefits of later marriage) all support the wider community in countries all over Africa and elsewhere.

Finally,  we were joined by two amazing girls from a Walthamstow secondary school – Rhiannon and Ronan.  They had won an essay competition and had,  as their prize,  spent the recent half-term holiday with Plan in Ghana, helping to raise awareness of the issues which affect girls’ education. These two 15 years old blew me away – so confident,  self-assured, witty, compassionate.  It’s no small thing to stand up in front of a room full of “grown ups” and talk about your recent trip – and yet they did,  and were amazing. 

“Boys are prioritised in Ghana”,  they announced.

“Girls are expected to help at home rather than go to school.”

As honoured guests of a high school near Accra, our girls presented the prizes on school sports day – which, as they told us to laughter and applause,  also consisted of handing over boxes of “Always” to the winning girls’ teams.

(“What are ‘always’?” – asked the man standing next to me … and then rather looked as if he hadn’t when he received the hissed answer of “Sanitary towels!”).

I loved these girls; as a member of the Plan team said to me afterwards: “Young voices are so important – not only do they talk sense but they capture an audience …” 

Anyway,  R & R were accompanied by a Guardian journalist;  read more about their adventures here.

Elswhere,  I’ve had a couple of comments made to me as to the “need” to have an International Women’s Day in 2010; to those people,  I’d refer you to the just-released World Economic Forum’s annual Corporate Gender Gap report,  which shows that,  even in countries such as the US,  where awareness and resources are far higher,  the numbers of women in the workforce at all are not,  actually,  that high – and as for India? 

(My use of bold)

Taken from the press release ,  we can see that:

The United States (52%), Spain (48%), Canada (46%) and Finland (44%) have the highest percentage of women employees at all levels among the responding companies. India is the country with the lowest percentage of women employees (23%), followed by Japan (24%), Turkey (26%) and Austria (29%). At the industry level, the findings of the survey confirm that the services sector employs the greatest percentage of women employees. Within this sector, the financial services and insurance (60%), professional services (56%) and media and entertainment (42%) industries employ the greatest percentage of women. The sectors that display the lowest percentage of women in the 20 economies are automotive (18%), mining (18%) and agriculture (21%).

Female employees tend to be concentrated in entry or middle level positions and remain scarce in senior management or board positions in most countries and industries. A major exception to this trend is Norway, where the percentage of women among boards of directors is above 40% for the majority of respondents. This is due to a government regulation that mandates a minimum of 40% of each gender on the boards of public companies.

The average for women holding the CEO-level position was a little less than 5% among the 600 companies surveyed. Finland (13%), Norway (12%), Turkey (12%), Italy (11%) and Brazil (11%) have the highest percentage of women CEOs in this sample.

But,  in Norway,  where there’s been a mandated quota system for a couple of years now, we see a more marked shift,  which leaves me wondering why so many countries (and companies) run scared of interventions such as quotas and targets.  There’s more on this in a political context on my friend Lee Chalmers’ excellent blog.  And Lee also links to and comments on the recent Economist article on gendercide … read this and then make the case that we no longer have a need for International Women’s Day, OK?

Is there a woman in the House?

19 Feb

By way of a contrast to (and a break from) all the Goa stuff – my article on the Downing Street Project  - of which I’m very proud to say I am a “founding sister” – has just been published on  The Glass Hammer website … take a look.

Weaving a tapestry

28 Jan

Sometimes I read something and it gives me that light bulb moment feeling wherein a number of strands of thought come together in my head, as if at the hands of a skilled weaver who can take amorphous bits of thread and turn them into a beautiful tapestry.

Last Sunday’s Observer magazine had just such a piece, which featured a cover story on model Erin O’Connor visiting a home workers’ collective for women in Delhi and reporting on their ethical clothing workshops, described in the article as an “innovative and revolutionary ethical fashion experiment”.

By cutting out the middlemen, organising the skilled female home workers and dealing directly with UK and US-based retailers, to date the members of SEWA (aka the All India Federation of Self-Employed Women’s Associations) have (my use of bold):

“ … increased our home workers’ wages by nearly 100 per cent and enabled a lot of women to come out of their homes to a SEWA centre to collect their work and meet. Then they engage with other ideas, like microfinance or education for their children.”

So then I was reminded me of my trip to Bangalore last month, when, at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s workshop on mentoring, I found myself paired with a woman from M&S (my first question: “Are you wearing their clothes?” My second: “Can you get their food in India?” The answers were, respectively, YES and NO).

Her name was Jyotsna, which is a Sanskrit name meaning something like “By the light of the new moon” – isn’t that beautiful? She is in charge of supplier compliance for the south east Asia region and we had a fascinating chat about the challenges clothing manufacturers and retailers (she previously worked for GAP) face in countries such as India with regard to child labour – and the economic need for some communities to have all members of a family in paid employment. I’ve heard a bit about M&S’s Plan A campaign from friends who work for them, plus seen the branded marketing in the stores, but it was very real to hear about it from Jyotsna, particularly when we discussed the dilemmas she faces when she visits communities who actively want to have their children at work – a stance which is obviously in direct contravention to the M&S position on child labour.

There’s a quote from Erin O’Connor in the Observer piece which reminds us that when you -

“… see an embroidered top on the high street …. [it’s] … been made by a very determined pair of hands” –

- and the thought that, depending on the source of the garment, perhaps some of that very tiny, delicate embroidery might have been done by a child’s fingers is truly abhorrent.

The article’s reference to creating a greater need for children to be educated as part of generating an awareness of how to break a cycle of poverty and deprivation, also reminded me of this comment from Plan’s 2009 annual report, The State of the World’s Girls:

“Educated girls become educated mothers with increased livelihood prospects; they also have a greater propensity than similarly educated males to invest in children’s schooling.”

More on Plan’s work soon – oh, and my fundraising for their fantastic “Because I Am a Girl” campaign has now pushed past the £300 mark. Many thanks to everyone who’s donated to date and made such a difference. Some of the women mentioned in the Observer article now earn around £40 a month (compared to around a tenner, previously), just to put that £300 in context.

In the news – baby girls

24 Nov

I’m very grateful to TLS, who is keeping my in-box full with relevant news stories, particularly about India. From the BBC website, he shared this sad story about the perceived “curse” of giving birth to a baby girl; the reference to hospitals not offering gender identification at scans reminded me that this also happens in UK hospitals which are located in areas (such as my own bit of London) which have a high Asian population. When I visited the gynae department a few years ago, the walls were plastered with posters in Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu stating in no uncertain terms that no gender scans were available, under any circumstances.

And a few days ago on the beach,  a woman, trailing three little girls and holding a baby in her arms,  approached me,  held the baby out and asked if I wanted to buy her. I laughed (nervously) and declined,  but she sat down and said,  in very good English, that she was serious and that,  for 5000 rupees (about £65) I could have the baby and her birth certificate; she would use this money to make sure that her next baby “was a boy” as she’d already had four girls and her family was cross with her.

I think this is the saddest conversation (of many) that I’ve had since I’ve been here.

On the refusing of a marriage licence …

16 Oct

… for a mixed race couple.

Yes, really.

In Louisiana.

In 2009, just in case any of us thought that we’d entered some weird space-time continuum and were back in 1959.

The full story is reported here in “The Guardian”, but can be summarised with this extract – my use of bold:

“A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage licence to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa parish, said it was his experience that most interracial marriages did not last long.

“I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell said. “I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else.”

Bardwell said he asked everyone who called about marriage if they were a mixed race couple. If they were, he did not marry them.”

The bit about the bathroom usage immediately reminded me of a wonderful (and recommended) book I read a few months ago called “The Help”, set in Mississippi in 1962, about a group of maids who work with one white woman to tell their stories (“black women raise white children but can’t be trusted not to steal the silver”) as part of the then burgeoning civil rights movement. In the book, it is very much the norm for “the help” to have their own toilet/washroom facilities and one employer feels societal pressure to build such an arrangement for her maid in a corner of the garage, rather than risk her family being contaminated by sharing the same facilities within the house.

Doesn’t it come across that this attitude lingers on in Louisiana, 47 years later? Quite incredible that permitting people of a different race to share your urinating environment is viewed as a mark of racial tolerance …

And how can it even be legal for anyone to refuse to marry two people on the grounds of race? Will watch the outcome of this story with interest.

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