feminist news round-up 28.04.13

28 April 2013

lip magazine

Photo by Pauline Mack

Ita Buttrose says female PM is treated differently

Australian of the Year Ita Buttrose said that Julia Gillard is treated differently because she is a woman at the National Press Club on Wednesday. The media trailblazer said it was unfair that Ms Gillard is criticised for her clothes and appearance. She also used the speech to call for the introduction of quotas to address the minority representation of women in boardrooms.

Historic win for Women of the Wall

The Jerusalem District Court has ruled in favour of the Women of the Wall activist group this week. The Court upheld an earlier decision of the magistrate’s court that found that women who pray at the Western Wall while wearing prayer shawls are not causing a public disturbance. Women of the Wall chairwoman Anat Hoffman said that ‘This is a critically important story for reclaiming Judaism, redefining our values and reclaiming the Wall.’

Malala Yousafzai voted into Huffington Post UK’s top 10 feminists

Malala Yousafzai, 15, was shot in the head by Taliban forces for supporting women’s rights in Pakistan last year. She topped the feminist list, as voted by the British public. Lady Gaga, Hillary Clinton, and Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, also made the list.

Masterchef keeps outraging everyone

‘Women do make good cooks, but men make great cooks!’ Hopefully many a network 10 viewer hold that view dear given the contents of the teaser trailer for the 2013 season of Masterchef Australia. The advert, which clearly demarcates gender splits with the use of pink and blue utensils, promises to be a battle of the gender stereotypes – where well groomed, neat women face up against men who ‘get the job done’ in the kitchen. There’s been no shortage of criticism, and the season hasn’t even begun.

Gen Y women more conservative: Cleo

Forget Paper Giants, a relaunch of Cleo magazine is said to tap in to generation Y’s conservative mindsets by removing all those promises of better orgasms on the cover. Cleo’s research into the new generation of readers is said to have revealed a ‘streak of conservatism’ in which only 7% of those surveyed aged 14-26 had recently had a one night stand. Whether this fact is enough to transform the sexually open publication of the 70s, 80s and 90s into a more sanitised tome is, we guess, up to the consumer.

Obama joins Planned Parenthood on abortion

US President Barack Obama has spoken at the national Planned Parenthood conference in support of the women’s health organisation’s work, and, more implicitly, against restrictions on abortion access in the United States. He spoke of the importance of providing women with access to services that let them choose what they do with their bodies, and assured the audience that “Planned Parenthood is not going anywhere.”

Wikipedia separates ‘women’ and, well, ‘normal’ novelists

Good ol’ Wikipedia isn’t known for its academically rigorous source material, but a recently discovered editorial policy that sees moving classic female novelists from ‘Novelist’ to ‘American Women Novelist’ has caused significant tensions. The move is said to have occurred because there were just too many ‘novelists’ on Wikipedia’s category list for that keyword, so they reportedly migrated female authors from the category over to their own, special ‘Women Novelist’ tag. After female authors across the English speaking world started to draw attention to the process, Harper Lee and others have since been reassigned their original tags. It’s not like Lee’s contributions to literature deserve to be featured on the main pages of ‘the largest and most popular general reference work on the internet’…

Bluestocking week celebrates women in Higher Ed this week

If you’re on an Australian uni campus this week, check out what your school is doing for national Bluestocking week, a whole 5 days devoted to celebrating women in higher education. While more women than ever are graduating with seriously fancy degrees, issues like the graduate pay gap and representation of female academics in high up positions are still a concern. Check your individual Student Union or Guild for details on what you can do to celebrate.