Nurturing a misogynist culture

The story this morning on the front page of the SMH about the students at an all male college of Sydney University and their proud “pro-rape”culture was horrifying.  But it was also not altogether surprising. The colleges at Sydney University seem to be mostly continuations of the elite private schools – students from the city [...]

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Flexible work

I went to a love in at work recently – 60 or 70 senior people from my part of our organisation. One of the topics was how to improve the proportion of senior women (as an aside, I found it pretty amusing that all the men at my table were shocked by the statistics – [...]

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Down Under Feminist Carnival

The January Down Under Feminist Carnival is at the NZ group blog The Hand Mirror here. Some great reading for the weekend. For all (any!) of my NZ readers, Happy Waitangi Day, and I hope you’re enjoying your long weekend.

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A Remarkable Woman

This week, I held a book written by my great-great-great-great grandmother.
Esther Beauzeville  was born in 1786. She was descended from Huguenots who had escaped from France in the late 17th century, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. She married the Reverend James Hewlett in 1809, and they had five children, the fourth of whom [...]

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Feminist Book review

In today’s book review, I’m doing a combined review of two Australian feminist books that were published in 2008. The Great Feminist Denial, by Monica Dux and Zora Simic, and The F word – how we learned to swear by Feminism, by Jane Caro and Catherine Fox. First a disclosure of my biases. I got [...]

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In the Classroom

Julia has a post where she asks her readers what they think of the many opportunities there are for parents to come into the classroom these days – what does that do to working parents?
Certainly compared with when I was at school, there are many many opportunities for school attendance. My mother was a stay-at-home mother – [...]

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It’s Carnival Time!

Those Hoydens lauredhel and tigtog are always looking for ways to enliven the feminist blogosphere. Welcome to the latest instalment of  one of their great ideas - the sixth downunder feminist blog carnival.

My feminist posts are often about the workplace, so that’s the main theme of this carnival. I’m invoking my host’s privilege to give you an old [...]

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Women’s glacial progress melted away

Today the EOWA released the results of their annual women in leadership census.
Sadly, the apposite headline is “Women’s glacial progress melted away”.
The census is pretty simple – someone reads the annual reports of the top 200 listed Australian companies, and counts the proportion of women on the senior executive teams (ie CEO plus his/her direct [...]

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Downunder Feminist Carnival

This month, I’m hosting the Down Under Feminist Carnival! A wonderful inititive started by those indefatigable Hoydens, tigtog and Lauredhel, at Hoyden about Town. I’m particularly keen to have posts with a workplace focus, so all workplace submisions gratefully received.
But all feminists posts are welcome, and if you don’t have your own blog, don’t be [...]

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Boys and fairies

Thanks to bluemilk, I got quite a few comments on my last post, so I feel I should follow it up with some actual commentary.
It seems to me that there are two issues with toys for boys, in opposite directions. The overly militarised aggressive toys - I’ll leave them for another post - and the strong societal [...]

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