Ballots & Bullets

Image by LSE Library

There’s a new report out on women’s political representation today. According to yesterday’s Observer it is ‘shocking’, and shows women’s presence in a range of professions – especially politics – to be ‘plummeting’.

Based on the report, however, there was very little evidence of much plummeting going on.  Women’s presence in the professions was fairly low …

Islamic women wearing the veil are often assumed to be either down-trodden or illiberal. Such assumptions have become framed in a discourse of ‘othering’ which denies these women’s histories, experiences and agency. This discourse plays an increasingly worrying role in Europe in augmenting divisions between communities, races and women. It becomes urgent therefore to disrupt such infantilizing and disempowering representations.…

Have you heard the one about the woman driver forced to pay higher insurance?

It’s not funny; but it is significant.

For while the recent EU ruling that forces car insurers to ignore sex when setting premiums might seem a like a small step in women’s long march towards equality it does challenge an insidious form of stereotyping

Are all …

To varying degrees all mainstream British political parties have signed up to the underlying principle that political institutions should (broadly) reflect the social characteristics of the people they represent.  This is most obvious with sex, where quotas for Westminster parliamentary seats were used by Labour in 1997 and 2005, with other measures used in the devolved institutions in Scotland and …