1 March 2018
IWD: Females can do ‘quick maths’
Last summer, Oxford University gave its Mathematics undergraduate students extra time to complete their exams (105 minutes instead of the usual 90 minutes). It was hoped this would address an inconsistency in results across the genders: at the time, 21.2% of women on the course graduated with first-class degrees, compared to 45.5% of men. The goal was to reduce “the undue effects of time pressure”, which are thought to have more of an impact on female students than male students.
28 February 2018
IWD: The migrant women of our healthcare system
As the UK debates immigration, Brexit and the NHS’s workforce crisis, we should educate ourselves on the situation of migrant women moving across the world to fix our ‘care deficit’.
28 February 2018
IWD: A woman is not a “person” within the meaning of the Solicitors Act 1843. A review of Bebb v The Law Society [1914] 1 Ch. 286
What is the basis for a legal ruling that a woman is not a person for the purposes of a statute? The starting point is a 14th century law textbook which states that women cannot be lawyers. Then, a 16th century scholar, Edward Coke, quotes that textbook approvingly but without any other authority.
27 February 2018
IWD: No More Tampon Tax. Period
Following on from Rebecca Ryan’s IWD Blog regarding Period Poverty last week, highlighting the need for social change in terms of the taboo around discussing women’s periods, it is also important to draw attention to another long overdue change in relation to periods and sanitary products; the way in which they are taxed.
27 February 2018
IWD: ‘Male feminists’ – controversial, contradictory or comrades in the fight for gender equality?
When Piers Morgan recently asked the President of the United States whether he was a feminist, his admission that he was not a devout supporter of the women’s movement somehow made headlines around the world. When the same question was posed to Jacob Rees-Mogg he branded the very idea of a man being a feminist as ‘ridiculous’ and Nigel Farage admitted he did not even know what ‘feminism’ means.
