VH: In your role in the Human Rights Commission, as a Commissioner, you’ve expressed a desire to work specifically on gender equality. Why is gender equality such an important and difficult issue...
Category: News
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Women in Political Leadership
For many scholars of political leadership, authority is the central concept that helps explain when presidents or prime ministers succeed and when they fail. In Western democracies such as...
Sisters in yarn: The rise and rise of small p politics
In recent years, democracies have undergone a number of significant transformations. On the one hand, they are characterized by a growing citizen distrust in formal institutions of politics, such...
The surprise swing in ‘unconscious bias’
Q: What motivated the ‘Going blind to see more clearly’ study?The driver for this study was quite simple: women make up more than half of the APS, but at senior levels the proportion of women falls...
Women in politics in PNG: A zero-sum game?
Despite a record 167 female candidates contesting the 2017 Papua New Guinea general elections, it is now clear there will be no women in the 111-seat PNG Parliament for the next five-year term....
Democracy in disarray when Violence stalks Women MPs
On 12 July, MPs took part in a Westminster Hall debate on abuse and intimidation of candidates and the public in the recent UK elections. During the debate, Chris Skidmore, the Minister for the...
Policing violence against women in the Pacific Islands
Have efforts to improve the policing of violence against women, in Pacific Island societies, increased women’s safety? Between 2015 and 2016 I conducted field research on precisely this question, in...
No progress without political will: Women in UK local government
As a new County Councillor elected in May this year, it’s disappointing to read that progress towards gender equality on UK councils has stalled. But what is more disappointing is that while the...
Smashing status quo in STEM – reaching for 50/50!
It’s 2017, and yet we are still reading so many articles titled “Why so few?” - why are there so few women in STEM? It is an easy question to answer: as a society, we have not worked hard enough to...