FEATURED LINKS

  • A brave Australian woman in Haiti
    26 January 2010 | 5:38 pm

    Today (January 26) Alison was awarded an AOM for “Humanitarian aid: Peraliya region of Sri Lanka following Boxing Day 2004 Tsunami. Below is an email she sent to her parents in Cronulla two days ago.

    Email from Alison Thompson sent to her parents in Sutherland Shire (Sydney)on 24 January 2010Subject: Hell in Haiti

    Hi mum and dad [...]

  • Tina Brown’s 10 things to stop bitching about
    4 January 2010 | 8:21 pm

    Tina Brown of The Daily Beast gives us a 2010 political Zeitgeist Guide. For instance, why is Obama so cool, not cool that way but so, so detached? And does it matter? (Hint: yes!) Are newspapers being killed by the Internet?  No.  Read it here

  • War and Peace in Oslo
    11 December 2009 | 11:19 am

    Read President Barack Obama’s acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize here

  • Australian Securities Exchange introduces gender reporting
    11 December 2009 | 11:09 am

    As of July 1, 2010 the Australian Securities Exchange will require all listed companies to report on the numbers and positions of women in their companies as part of their corporate governance reporting requirements.  This important reform will show which companies are dragging their feet when it comes to hiring and promoting women, in management [...]

  • French government legislates to require 50 per cent women on boards
    11 December 2009 | 11:04 am

    In a radical step, the government of Nikolas Sarkozy has introduced legislation to require all listed companies in France to have 50 per cent of their directors women within five years.  Companies must have 20 per cent women directors within 18 months and 40 per cent within four years. These requirements exceed those introduced in [...]

  • Not forgetting women at Copenhagen
    10 December 2009 | 3:55 pm

    COPENHAGEN: FOCUS ON GENDER

    Government Leaders from around the world are currently meeting in Copenhagen to face an unprecedented task: to come to a global consensus on nearly every major aspect of coping with climate change, including gender. It has long been recognised that women are disproportionately affected [...]

  • President Barack Obama’s Thanksgiving Message
    25 November 2009 | 7:26 pm

    Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, Americans across the country will sit down together, count our blessings, and give thanks for our families and our loved ones.

    American families reflect the diversity of this great nation. No two are exactly alike, but there is a common thread they each share.

    Our families are bound together through times of joy and [...]

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My article on Germaine Greer goes global

I have had a huge response to my article on Germaine Greer, published a week ago in the Sunday Age. You can read comments posted on this website in the right-hand column of the home page, and also see my Facebook page for many, many more. Now the article has been picked up by the Global Sisterhood Network.  It’s gone viral!

Liberty belle

I have written about Germaine Greer in the Sunday Age, looking at the way in which The Female Eunuch – published forty years ago this year – helped so many women start groping their way towards freedom, and asking why it is that Greer is still subject to such vicious attacks even today. Read article

High praise for ‘On Luck’

A review in the Sun-Herald today describes my essay ‘On Luck’ as “brilliant”.  The essay is now included in an ‘On-nibus’ collection of eight of the “little books on big themes” essays published by Melbourne University Press in 2008.

Another standout is Anne Summers’s excellent essay on the notion of the “lucky country” – a phrase that was intended as an insult but which we have somehow transformed into a national epithet.

» Continue reading High praise for ‘On Luck’ »

Is the federal government retreating from women’s equality?

An article in today’s Sun-Herald quotes an unnamed “government source” as saying that although the numbers of women on ASX200 Boards was “woeful”, the government would not legislate quotas.  The same article also states that the federal government has already rejected the option of providing tax incentives for companies to hire more women.  Instead, if the article is well-informed, the government appears to be heading in the direction of offering men more flexibility in their hours of work. This is fine, but it does not address the burning question of the stark inequality of women in employment: their earnings, and their ability to be appointed to top jobs in management and on boards.

It is disappointing, to say the least, that the government is not willing to engage in an open dialogue about these issues, preferring instead apparently to engage in “reform via media leaks”.  Read the article