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May 29 - June 20, 2021
a thirty-year analysis of murder in Sweden found that nine out of ten murders are committed by men.
When a woman kills, is the killing as likely to be labelled murder as when a man kills? Even if we accept that courts are more sympathetic to a female plea of justifiable homicide, the disparity between murder rates by men and by women remains huge.
It’s on banknotes: in 2013 the Bank of England announced they were replacing the only female historical figure on their banknotes with another man
Counting Elizabeth Fry. Not counting the Queen. Jane Austen is now on notes as cash becomes increasingly obsolete.
it wasn’t a renaissance for women, who were still largely excluded from intellectual and artistic life.
Notable exceptions to this rule amongst the rich - Elizabeth I, Isabella d'Este and Vittoria Colonna.
When the Star Wars franchise released two films in a row with a female lead howls of outrage reverberated around the manosphere.
The original trilogy was a real sausage fest. In A New Hope, there were just 2 female characters and they never met.
Women will buy books by and about men, but men won’t buy books by and about women (or at least not many).
Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of injustice is Rosalind Franklin, whose work (she had concluded via her X-ray experiments and unit cell measurements that DNA consisted of two chains and a phosphate backbone) led James Watson and Francis Crick (now Nobel Prize-winning household names) to ‘discover’ DNA.
Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling are the forgotten ones.
‘It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman! Vote for me!’
Later in the book, it's argued that Sanders missed the point. Missing the point does not make him wrong.
They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them.
I suspect most women would have made the same mistake of prioritising main roads thinking it would boost the economy more.
But needing to plan for peak hours doesn’t explain why female travel (which doesn’t tend to fit into peak hours, and therefore ‘doesn’t affect the maximum capacity of systems’) gets ignored.
Don't planners consider the school run?
Women may also in any case require more trips to the bathroom than men:
Is this true relative to prostate problems? It may be but data is needed.
In the UK, 50% of public toilets were closed between 1995 and 2013
A UK Department for Transport study highlighted the stark difference between male and female perceptions of danger,
Self reporting. Are men more afraid to say they're scared?
which have a hugely male-dominated workforce from top to bottom
Do air stewards outnumber air stewardesses?
‘only one-third felt that transit agencies should really do something about it’,
Wanting change applied by legislators to all transit authorities rather than doing it unilaterally does not mean they do not want change.
‘the city of Portland has a digital timetable in the bus stop so you know when the next bus is going to come’,
Having experienced this myself, it needs to be more than just a timetable. When a bus is not on time, it's not good enough for it to disappear from the screen. Is it delayed by 2 minutes or is it and the next one in an hour cancelled? And why?
there’s that extra mental hurdle to clear that most men simply don’t face, and it takes a particular kind of self-confidence not to be bothered by it at all.
Provide the evidence that most men don't feel this first time too.
Vigdís Finnbogadóttir beat three men to become the world’s first democratically elected female head of state.
when women start to cohabit, ‘their housework time goes up while men’s goes down, regardless of their employment status’.
What are the differences for same sex couples?
‘cultural differences in attitudes and beliefs between males and females around the subject of stress’.
It's less OK for men to admit stress.
Without the UK, the women of the EU will be free to benefit from this more progressive leave allowance.
Women are told to watch their tone, to step back. They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational. Out of all these words, only aggressive appeared in men’s reviews at all – ‘twice with an exhortation to be more of it’.
Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity, or a belief that you are not sexist, makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way.
if a game is presented to them as intended for ‘children who are really, really smart’, five-year-old girls are as likely to want to play it as boys – but six-year-old girls are suddenly uninterested.
For example, quotas, which, contrary to popular misconception, were recently found by a London School of Economics study to ‘weed out incompetent men’ rather than promote unqualified women.
In fact, the formula may overestimate female metabolic rate by as much as 35%,
Jumping from the metabolic rate of 'young women' to a generalisation about all ages of women including the menopausal.
Due to the low global levels of female education, women are also less likely to be able to read,
Hans Rosling has argued that assumptions as to how bad the state of female literacy is, are very out of date.
Searching for ‘author’ also delivered an imbalanced result, with only 25% of the Google Image results for the term being female compared to 56% of actual US authors,
Are you comparing like with like? Author search will come up with images of Dickens, Tolstoy and Proust rather than a representative selection of contemporary US authors.
on average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue.
Only the female business owners' really good ideas get investment. That tells us nothing about whether the rejected ideas would or would not have been good investments.
Women tend to sit further forward than men when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. Our legs need to be closer to reach the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard.
This would be a problem for men of that height too.
As a result of the extended delay in receiving a diagnosis and treatment she has been left with an increased risk of colon cancer.
They wouldn't have thought of pregnancy for a boy showing these symptoms but wouldn't they still see the problem as psychological?
male bodies were used three times as often as female bodies to illustrate ‘neutral body parts’.
How do bodies donated for research compare in numbers for the genders?
The ‘primary outcome’ of a double-blind, randomised, controlled trial of sildenafil citrate, was, ladies, you may want to sit down for this: ‘total pain relief over 4 consecutive hours’, with ‘no observed adverse effects’.96 Imagine. Created in 1989, sildenafil citrate is the medical name for Viagra.
Given the gender pay gap, this is almost universally the man in heterosexual couples
This is sexist but it is not just a gender problem. In relationships, gay or straight, the primary care giver is extremely unlikely to be the higher earner, regardless of gender.
when Bernie Sanders said, ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”’, he was wrong. The problem isn’t that anyone thinks that’s good enough. The problem is that no one does. On the other hand plenty of people seem to think that a candidate being a woman is a good enough reason not to vote for her.
If no one believes that it is good enough to say "I'm a woman! Vote for me!", then that means Bernie Sanders was right. Your argument is not that he was wrong but that he missed the point. Rephrase it as "he was right, but the problem isn't.." I suspect, if asked, he would agree with you.
‘It’s just a feature of human psychology,’ she explains, to assume that our own experiences mirror those of human beings in general.
as female representation increases, so does hostility against female politicians.
Is the abuse triggered by the higher proportion or by the increase? Imagine two parliaments which now have the same proportions of female representation as one another. One has long had those proportions but the other has only recently changed. Do they experience the same or different rates of abuse?
He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning,
Playing devil's advocate - how do you objectively judge if his questioning was as 'dogged' in tone as well as substance as hers?
Is this relative socio-economic status or absolute socio-economic status? Do poor women die because they are poor or because they are not men?
Jane Austen
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