News

On Friday and Monday we publish the problems that will feature in a forthcoming Dear Jeremy advice column in the Guardian Work supplement, so readers can offer their own advice and suggestions. We then print the best of your comments alongside Jeremy’s own insights. Here is the latest dilemma – what are your thoughts? I [...]

WeAreTheCity Inspirational Woman, Farida Gibbs, CEO of Gibbs S3 wins the 2012 Entrepreneur Award at the Asian Women of Achievement Awards 2012, at the very prestigious event at London’s Hilton Hotel on Wednesday 16th May. The ‘Entrepreneur’ category of the awards, supported by the MITIE Group, was perhaps one of the most anticipated of the [...]

Suzanne Moore (The Second Sexism is just victim-envy, G2, 17 May) would have her readers believe that my new book “details how men, not women, are discriminated against”. I specifically noted that I do not deny that women are the victims of sexism. My argument is that men also are. Nor did I claim, as [...]

Tim Burton‘s Dark Shadows may have received a kicking from critics, but one person has emerged from the dust-up unscathed: Eva Green, the French actress who plays the evil witch Angelique Bouchard. With her red-lacquered lips, her crazy-beautiful eyes and possessed-marionette limbs, Green’s lolling vamp represents the perfection of a type Burton has long been [...]

Christiane Taubira, justice The 60-year-old is the highest-ranking woman in the cabinet. She has been an MP in French Guiana since 1993 and wrote a French law in 2001 making slavery a crime against humanity. In 2002, she was France’s first black candidate for the presidency. Marisol Touraine, social affairs and health The Harvard-educated head [...]

The male-only Palme d’Or shortlist sparked outrage at the Cannes film festival this week. A group of prominent French film-makers were so angry they wrote an open letter of condemnation. Lucy Walker, director of the Oscar-nominated film Waste Land, and Trudie Styler, who has co-founded Maven, a film production company to support female talent in [...]

Tim Burton‘s Dark Shadows may have received a kicking from critics, but one person has emerged from the dust-up unscathed: Eva Green, the French actress who plays the evil witch Angelique Bouchard. With her red-lacquered lips, her crazy-beautiful eyes and possessed-marionette limbs, Green’s lolling vamp represents the perfection of a type Burton has long been [...]

Was it just a few weeks ago that Time ran a cover story claiming women were poised to become “the richer sex” – getting more education than men, working up a storm and, in one out of four marriages, bringing home the fatter slice of bacon? That was followed by Katie Roiphe’s fact-free Newsweek cover [...]

Was it just a few weeks ago that Time ran a cover story claiming women were poised to become “the richer sex” – getting more education than men, working up a storm and, in one out of four marriages, bringing home the fatter slice of bacon? That was followed by Katie Roiphe’s fact-free Newsweek cover [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy promised a parity government in 2007, but failed to deliver. Five years later, newly elected president François Hollande has just done it. For the first time, France boasts as many women as men in its 34-member cabinet. It may have looked gimmicky at first; it does however feel as if a hurdle has [...]

In 2010, it appeared David Cameron had succeeded in delivering women’s votes back to the Conservative party: securing once again the support of middle- and high-income mothers of young children – those women who had turned to New Labour under Tony Blair. Since the election, the story looks less favourable for the party. Spending cuts [...]

Are men the new women? Are they having a harder time than silly moaning ladies? Has feminism gone too far? Has political correctness been put away for its own good? These are such familiar cultural tropes that we may dismiss the word trope altogether. Instead I would use another word: tripe. The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against [...]

Debate around skinniness in fashion is not new. From blogs to magazine editors to parliament, the issue of abnormally thin models comes up again and again, whether it’s Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson calling for airbrushing to be banned in advertising or Vogue Italy’s Franca Sozzani admitting that “the current inclination to embrace a female [...]

In the May number of “Harper’s Magazine” Miss Lillian Symes writes that she is growing weary of the losing game played by the modern woman. Man, she complains, has been only too ready to allow feminist doctrines to work out to his own advantage, and complacently to watch his wife assume the double burden of [...]

Bested by Britney US singer Demi Lovato (nope, we hadn’t either) must have been miffed to discover the other new American X Factor judge is world-famous pop star Britney Spears. Thunder promptly stolen. Payback time Sixty years ago the House of Commons agreed equal pay for women doing the same jobs as men. But, according [...]

Aishwarya Rai is no stranger to Cannes. The Bollywood actor and former Miss World has attended the film festival 10 times, but her appearance on the red carpet next week is set to be her most talked about. The cause of a controversy raging in India lies not with her latest film – Rai is [...]

“What has changed in cinema? Everything has changed!” exclaimed Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes film festival, during the presentation of the 65th Cannes festival film nominations. Everything?! For one second, we trembled. But for no reason, it turned out, as the 22 officially selected movies – happy coincidence – were directed by 22 men. [...]

Editorial eyebrows were raised when I suggested W for Women in my theatrical alphabet, and I can see why. After all, I wouldn’t do M for Men. But, far from ghettoising women, I want to do the reverse: to pose the question as to whether gender-based definitions were becoming less important as we edged towards [...]

It’s a world where guys have superpowers and the girls are very often disempowered. But now two Glasgow-based women are attempting to shake up the often misogynistic comic book environment with the UK’s biggest comic convention, Kapow!, in London this weekend. Sisters Lucy and Sarah Unwin not only hope that their show will be a [...]

Returning to work from maternity leave can be a daunting prospect. Faced with the challenges of balancing family demands with their artistic careers, a group of female artists have formed a fledgling movement known as Desperate Artwives – an ironic twist on the title of the hit American drama – to continue exhibiting and working. [...]

Were you breastfed as a baby and if so, do love or hate your mother? Do you have children of your own and if so, do you or did you breastfeed them? And for how long? And if it was a long time ago, do they still speak to you? And did you ever do [...]

The Treasury failed to consider how crucial policies would affect women, disabled people and ethnic minorities before the 2010 spending review, according to a report by the equality watchdog. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it was “unable to establish” whether the coalition checked its proposals meant for vulnerable people – despite this [...]

Vidal Sassoon, who has died at the age of 84, spent decades at the literal and metaphorical cutting edge of hairdressing, having risen from abject poverty to conquer London, New York and Los Angeles. Four times married, he was a charmer, a philanthropist, a fighter against antisemitism, a man who loved his mum (setting her [...]

Illustration: David Foldvari When Alexandra Shulman, the editor of Vogue, announced recently that her magazine would no longer feature underweight or underage models, I can’t say I dropped my Krispy Kreme in sheer molten glee on the first count. I am not one of those fat birds who feels miserable because models are thin. Frankly, [...]

The redoubtable Jean Alys Barker, Baroness Trumpington of Sandwich, in the County of Kent – Trumpers to her friends – was made a Conservative peer in 1980. She was in Strasbourg at a conference when she heard. “The British consul rang me and told me that my husband had desperately been trying to get through [...]

When I was at university in the late 80s, the influence of The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s milestone feminist study of the Victorian imagination, could be felt in every corner of the department of English: liberating breeze or poisonous miasma, depending on your point of view. As a result, our [...]

I suppose it’s like a failing relationship. That final morning where you wake up and lie staring at the ceiling until the alarm goes, and the first thing out of your mouth is a hoarse “It’s over.” It feels like a shock, until years later you look back and join the dots – those silent car [...]

Mothers and carers who choose to stay at home instead of going out to work will receive a full state pension for the first time under an overhaul of the UK’s retirement system. Under the reforms, mothers and carers who retire from 2015 will be treated as if they had worked throughout their lives, giving [...]

Much has been made of the rural Pakistani and Muslim background of nine Asian men imprisoned for their involved in a paedophile ring based in Rochdale. It is said the men justified the abuse because these were girls of the decadent west, and therefore unworthy of respect. This is deeply hurtful to Muslims. Islam, they [...]

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been debating the biggest issues on Girls with some of the savviest girls-turned-women around, including: Amanda Marcotte, Julieanne Smolinski, Lauren Williams, Teresa Wiltz, Anna Holmes, Amanda Hess and Alyssa Rosenberg. We’ve talked a lot about race and a lot about feminism. The discussions have been passionate and poingant. Earlier [...]

When the Time magazine cover for a story on attachment parenting “Are You Mom Enough?” hit the web this week, the reaction ran the full range from troll-friendly to thoughtful. It’s not difficult to see why this headline and design drew so much heat: without even wading into “mommy wars”, compounding Americans’ puritanical discomfort with [...]

At the Royal Court theatre last week I sat next to the novelist Linda Grant. We were there to see Mike Bartlett’s new play Love, Love, Love, which is a satirical attack on the good fortune of the baby-boomer generation, and follows the story of a spectacularly selfish couple and their two blighted children over [...]

I came prepared with a list of my skills. I would be the best altar boy ever. So good, in fact, that he would only need one: just Father Hansen and me, on stage. Blowing everyone away. Our meeting was in the rectory study. Wood paneling, leather chairs, even more Jesus pictures than we had, [...]

Her eyes wide with fear and pain, Théthé – who is haemorrhaging and has a fever – groans and pushes as she lies on a brown vinyl mattress, slick with blood and amniotic fluid, in one of the worst places in the world to be a mother (pdf). After a final push, a nurse holds [...]

I came prepared with a list of my skills. I would be the best altar boy ever. So good, in fact, that he would only need one: just Father Hansen and me, on stage. Blowing everyone away. Our meeting was in the rectory study. Wood paneling, leather chairs, even more Jesus pictures than we had, [...]

On a recent weekday evening at London’s Wembley Stadium, half a dozen Muslim women, some wearing headscarves, were taking it in turns to flip over some male opponents with impressive shoulder-height kicks. These women, demonstrating Safari Kickboxing’s female-only Muay Thai Kickboxing classes, were taking part in a ground-breaking celebration of Muslim women in sport. Pioneered [...]

One of the most prolific and leaders in style,  Vidal Sassoon, who pioneered women’s hair styling from his Canrnaby Street salon in the swingin 1960′s, died at his home in Los Angeles aged 84. Police were called to Sassoon’s mansion in Mulholland Drive, Beverly Hills at about 10.30am on Wednesday where they found the stylist dead. [...]

Much of the media coverage and discussion of the trial of nine men convicted of sexually abusing five teenage girls is focused on ethnicity. That eight of the perpetrators are Asian appears to be more relevant than the reasons why the rape of young, vulnerable girls is so widespread and the crime so difficult to [...]

Professor Lesley Yellowlees, soon to become the Royal Society of Chemistry’s first woman president, has said that Britain is half a century behind the US when it comes to opportunities for female researchers. Is she right? The US certainly has an illustrious record when it comes to female scientists. In 1873, industrial chemist Ellen Swallow [...]

Arrested for being a public nuisance outside a takeaway shop, the 15-year-old blamed her behaviour – screaming and bashing the counter – on the systemic abuse she had suffered at the hands of two men inside. During six hours of videotaped testimony she went on to say how she’d been lured in by the men [...]

Niger is the worst country on earth in which to be a mother, according to a report by Save the Children. The charity’s annual Mothers’ Index uses statistics covering female and child health and nutrition, as well as prospects for women’s education, economic prosperity and political participation in its assessment of 165 countries. Niger’s current [...]

Just over a year ago, as Lucy Foster was approaching her 30th birthday, she felt, “for the first time in my life … an awareness of my gender”. An associate director with the acclaimed theatre company Improbable, she says: “It wasn’t that I was exactly thinking about having babies, but there seemed to be something [...]

Just a few weeks ago François Hollande – then still a candidate vying to become the president of France – wrote a letter to one of the country’s leading women’s organisations. “The struggle for equality, for women’s rights … is not a ‘women’s matter’, but the struggle of every citizen,” he said. The pitch for [...]

This week, HBO viewers will get a fresh dose of awkward sex and cringe-worthy moments when Girls returns on Sunday. Now that we’re four episodes deep, there are a couple of things we know for sure: 1. People love it2. People hate it3. People can’t stop talking about it “Did you watch Girls last night?” [...]

A federal appeals judge says Texas cannot ban Planned Parenthood from receiving state funds. Fifth circuit judge Jerry Smith agreed Friday that there is sufficient evidence the state’s law banning Planned Parenthood from participating in the state’s Women’s Health Program is unconstitutional. He let stand an injunction blocking Texas from enforcing it. Smith had stayed [...]

He has promised an equal number of men and women in cabinet, and to reintroduce a ministry of women’s rights. But will François Hollande be the president who finally took on the pervasive sexism in French politics, if as polls predict he wins Sunday’s presidential election? The Socialist frontrunner, who was on Friday leading by [...]

A Twitter user called Conservative MP Louise Mensch “a typical soulless rich whore”; TV critic AA Gill said Professor Mary Beard is “too ugly for TV”; a tweet allegedly described the 19-year-old victim of convicted rapist and footballer Ched Evans as “a money-grabbing little tramp”. These are just a few examples of misogynistic abuse levelled at women in [...]

Thank you for raising awareness regarding the crisis facing the Women’s Library (Women’s archive hunts for a saviour, 1 May). Over 50 years ago the Guardian’s Mary Stott was instrumental in founding our organisation – the National Women’s Register – the then Housewives Register. Our archive is housed by the library and we would be [...]

I know I wasn’t the only barrister to feel disheartened by this article which appeared on the Guardian’s website on Thursday, written by a woman who had been treated unfairly in the way in which tasks were assigned to her and her fellow pupils during their training. I would not try to claim that sexist [...]

For every 100,000 women who give birth in Tanzania, almost 800 die – making it one of the most dangerous places in the world to have a baby. The comparative figure in the UK is just 8.2. The main reason for this high risk is the lack of skilled health workers and facilities for pregnant [...]