When were women granted the vote around the world? A timeline

 

Looking at a chronology of when women were allowed to vote is truly astounding. It’s actually unfathomable to believe that Switzerland, the country with the highest nominal wealth per adult, with riches to feed prosperity and innovation, ONLY GAVE WOMEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO CHOOSE WHO SHOULD RULE THE COUNTRY IN 1971.

Money truly doesn’t buy wisdom. We call ourselves advanced and civilised in 2015, but this is also a fresh reminder of how new basic rights like the vote really are to women, and how far we still have to go to achieve equality.

Let’s have a look at the timeline:

• 1893– New Zealand – So it turns out that New Zealand has a pretty progressive track record. In the same year in Elizabeth Yates also became a mayor, the first time such a post had been held by a female anywhere in the British Empire. It’s amazing to think that they achieved rights for women 35 YEARS before Britain

• 1902 – Australia
• 1906 – Finland
• 1913 – Norway
• 1915 – Denmark
• 1917 – Canada
• 1918 – Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia
• 1919 – Netherlands
• 1920 – United States
• 1921 – Sweden
• 1928 – Britain, Ireland
• 1931 – Spain
• 1934 – Turkey
• 1944 – France
• 1945 – Italy
• 1947 – Argentina, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan
• 1949 – China
• 1950 – India
• 1954 – Colombia
• 1957 – Malaysia, Zimbabwe
• 1962 – Algeria
• 1963 – Iran, Morocco
• 1964 – Libya
• 1967 – Ecuador
• 1971 – Switzerland
• 1972 – Bangladesh
• 1974 -Jordan
• 1976 – Portugal
• 1989 – Namibia
• 1990 – Western Samoa
• 1993 – Kazakhstan, Moldova
• 1994 – South Africa
• 2005 – Kuwait
• 2006 – United Arab Emirates

• 2015– Saudi Arabia – women cannot vote in any elections whatsoever in Saudi Arabia and they can’t run for political office. Both powers will apparently be instated this year
• ? – Vatican City, Italy – (Not a country, I know). The Vatican City is a city-state ruled by a religious figure (a theocracy). Only cardinals under the age of 80 are allowed to vote and as women can’t be ordained as priests, women can’t vote. I thought religion was all about championing equality and understanding?

A simple guide to the gender pay gap

So many people talk about the gender pay gap, but it’s really difficult to get a clear picture of why women are paid less in comparison to men. It’s also not clear why, for example, if one man and one woman are both nurses, they get paid a different amount of money each year. Sometimes living on Earth is very weird.

I thought I’d put together a short, tangible and personally profitable guide to why this happens, with some links to trustworthy resources and reports. Hold on to your seatbelts:

Direct discrimination

• That’s where women get paid less than men for doing exactly the same job, with the same job description, at the same company. It’s actually illegal and employees can challenge this through the legal system (you can find out more about doing this via the Citizens Advice Bureau)
• There’s evidence that proves this really happens. A study in the US found that, for example, a female software developer earns 4% less per year than a male software developer. This doesn’t just relate to certain careers either, the research found that a female nurse earns 2% less than a male nurse per year
• This could be due to an employer simply discriminating against gender. In the famous Betty Dukes vs. Walmart case many agreed with her claims that she had no chance of or opportunity for promotion in comparison to her male counterparts. Sadly Dukes didn’t get anywhere because the case was ‘too big’ and ‘wishy washy’. This wasn’t a Dagenham-style case with one key issue – inequality of pay – but a complex case with numerous claims that the justice system simply couldn’t handle
• It’s also not just about immediate pay, but pay over a lifetime. A woman may be paid less because men are in work for a longer period of time (they may not leave work to look after children or take long maternity leave) and therefore would earn more in their lifetime.

‘Female occupations’

• Sadly as we live in a world of stereotype and cultural conditioning, women and men typically gravitate towards different kinds of careers. Men may favour engineering, a job in the army, or an IT job, while women might be beauticians, nurses or teachers. Rather than relying on stereotypes though, we can focus on people like famous engineer Sandi Rhys Jones OBE, Serena Williams, or Fields Medal for mathematics winner Maryam Mirzakhani. Why were we never taught about mathematicians Emmy Noether or Sophie Germain in school, rather than Stephen Hawking and Isambard Kingdom Brunel?
• The careers that women fulfil are often low paid and low valued, and as the European Commission states, this is the case because more value can be attached to responsibility for capital than to responsibility for people. No shit. We see this when social workers – those who are paid to protect children from abusive environments – or nurses – who care for the terminally ill – are underpaid and undervalued when engineers working for private companies are cherished with high salaries and glittering pension and benefit packages.

 ‘Down to choice’

• Critics of the gender pay gap will say that as women choose their occupations and choose to have children, it’s difficult to create policies that will encourage employers to close the gap
• That’s where the difficulty lies, legal cases can be cited as ‘wishy washy’ because there is a lot of choice involved in not asking for more money at work and having a baby
• However just because a woman may choose a lower paid or undervalued role, this doesn’t mean that she should be paid less than a man doing the same job. It also doesn’t mean that women should be worse off because they are likely to have children
• Closing the gap can be done and as the OECD shows countries such as New Zealand, Spain and Norway have nearly achieved this.

Confidence

• Although I hate to propel the evil rumour that women are less likely to ask for a pay rise (it’s offensive to brand all women with the ‘too nice’ stamp) women, as well as men, should be more proactive in regards to asking for a higher salary, a promotion, or other benefits
• Research published by YouGov in 2013 has found that from a sample of 971 women who work full or part time, a minority of women (39%) say they would probably ask for a promotion or pay rise if they thought they deserved it, compared to a majority (52%) of men who say they would
• Researchers in the US have found, however, that when employers mention that a salary is negotiable, women are more likely to haggle than men. When a salary is stated as non-negotiable, men are more likely to push the boundaries
• Why are women afraid to challenge the system?

How can the gender gap be challenged?

• In the UK, the Equality Act 2010 section 13 makes direct discrimination illegal and you can use this to challenge your employer
• Taking Norway as an example, in 1993 a federally-regulated paternity leave quota was introduced, with a special 10-week quota allotted for fathers that could not be transferred to mothers. This encouraged huge shifts in attitudes from employers and the public towards gender roles and child-rearing. If you share out maternity and paternity leave, this means that women may not have to give up their careers, take more time out from work and therefore earn less money compared to men over their lifetime. Men will also feel more comfortable will taking paternity leave if it cannot be transferred to mothers, as maternity leave will not be at risk, prompting a shift in attitudes and behaviours
• You could get rid of pay negotiations altogether, like interim CEO of Reddit Ellen Pao. This is controversial however, as pay negotiations, when approached by women, can be successful. Why would you get rid of one mechanism for flexibility?
• We should challenge the stereotypes that stop women from entering certain careers and celebrate women who succeed in varied careers, from finance to maths to teaching
• Earlier this month David Cameron outlined plans to increase the national living wage, which would ensure that women in those underpaid and undervalued roles are paid more. He also claims that companies with more than 250 employees will have to publish their pay gap (I can imagine a lot of resistance to this from big business!)
• The pay gap can be immediately challenged if individuals have more open conversations between colleagues about salaries (don’t be shy – remember this isn’t against the law).

Hope this is helpful and has answered a few questions!

If you’d like to read more or campaign about the gender pay gap, visit The Fawcett Society’s website.

The Nokia Lumia Range – Because Women Struggle Using Technology

Calling all women out there who have a mobile phone! Have you ever used it for anything other than checking your make-up, padding out your bra or using it to repeatedly bash yourself around the head when Nokia unleash ridiculously patronising adverts like this?

I know I haven’t. In 2014, although the UK Skills Council for Business and Information Technology states that only 16% of people working in IT strategy and planning are women, there are scores of talented females making waves in digital technologies. Take, for example, Jo Kerr, who created Team Digital at Girlguiding and mentors other women working in the digital world for charities, or Shannon Haigh, a 23 year-old who has devised and led award-winning digital campaigns for charities such as Water Aid, plus so many more female digital gurus. A study by the Internet Advertising Bureau has also found that 52% of all gamers in the UK are women, challenging the way we perceive modern women and how they interact with technology. We know that Nokia thinks that young women are only interested in a good looking phone and not knowing what a quad core processor is, but contrary to that belief, women are increasingly interested in gaming, code, JavaScript and C++ – no longer strictly male preserves.

It’s astounding that Nokia would then release this pearl:

Generic white middle-class Tom sits upon his lofty throne as the manager of his own business and his own Nokia Lumia 930! Not only can he brandish his mobile with masterly effervescence, but he can also talk its language, spitting out ‘One Drive’ and ‘HD Video’ in his one man techno-rap soliloquy. Oh, he looks so competent with his shiny office and his numerous friends, while the young woman in Nokia’s first ad is stumbling blindly through a brave new modern world, desperately seeking comfort from her clothes and her puppy-like younger sister.

What a sad world Nokia thinks we live in, and what a sad symbol this is of the endemic inequality that women face every day. Bad Nokia.

Who’s afraid of the big bad b-word?

Breasts. Breasts breasts breasts. Whenever you utter the dreaded b-word it seems that women, and men, recoil under the sheer horror of it, preferring to beat out ‘tits’, ‘boobs’, or the favoured ‘gazongas’. There are actually hundreds of words that we use to skirt around just saying breasts, which is a bit odd. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a friend say breasts (e.g. “ooh this bra is really hurting my breasts”), and in romantic situations when the lights are dimmed low and Barry White croons like a whale pup, no man has ever seductively said “C’mere baby, let me touch your… breast.”

So why don’t we like using the word breast?

Perhaps it could be that women don’t want to talk about themselves, or be discussed, akin to a chicken fillet. The word isn’t particularly sexy and if using it conjures up images of KFC-grease splattered hands and pink glutinous globules in Tesco then avoiding it like the plague is perfectly understandable.

It could very well be that it’s a purely semiotic or phonetic issue. Breasts, like those attractive words moist, smear or pustule, are words with strong socio-cultural connotations and conjure some pretty repellent imagery.

Or maybe, as it’s a formal biological term and we only ever really hear the word when we see a medical specialist, breast subconsciously strikes the fear of god into us. Breast cancer and breast pump aren’t so endearing and might encourage us to scream gazongas from the rooftops.

The above may all be valid, but you can’t truly forget that, as women, we might not like breasts because we are made to feel like we should shy away from talking frankly about our ‘rude parts’. Ridiculously, we resort to employing a hundred other words instead of just talking about the body parts that we all have in plain language.

A little while ago, we became fixated with vajazzling (or decorating our vaginas with jewels) just to avoid realising that what we have might be naturally beautiful. We had to shave them so we had no hair, write ‘eat me’ messages around them in jewels to make vaginas more enticing, instead of just appreciating what they are.

Similarly, using words like airbags, bee-stings and baps all spark a laugh but, again, using those words just distracts from talking about our bodies in a natural way, and also make breasts seem frankly ridiculous.

I think it’s time we should just own breasts and vaginas and feel comfortable using them. Then maybe we’ll then start to become more at peace with our own bodies, instead of constantly trying to change them.

Garnier Perfect Blur – actually destroys wrinkles and banishes your pores

Here’s another foundation that not only gives you the benefits of freakishly smooth skin, but practically froths at the mouth to reduce the appearance of the completely natural ageing process, and block or ‘minimise’ your pores that serve a really important biological function. Great product and great marketing, Garnier.

Perfect Blur’s advertising is completely bizarre. For some ungodly reason, it appears that using one foundation will actually pluck your eyebrows for you (see above before and after contrast), change your eye colour, dye your hair and it kind of thins your face too. The above example just shows the importance of stopping and examining advertising like this, if you have the time, to realize that a) this is unattainable beauty and b) why should you want to look like a perfect blur all the time and not yourself?

Why should be always have to put up with this boring homogenized advertising? The image above states that it ‘has not been retouched’. Like shit it hasn’t. Can you remember the days when major organisations were promising to cut down on airbrushing and photoshopping images of women, like Debenhams in June last year? I wonder what happened to gestures like that? Those gestures mean that money might be lost, and what a shame that would be.

Why is it that women model art?

I’ve always found it very odd that when new art exhibitions are announced in newspapers, you always find a woman ‘modelling’ it (usually looking thoughtful or wistful)…

Is it so you can compare the beauty of the artwork with the woman’s beauty?

Or come to a true understanding that yes, women do go to art galleries…

Or could it be to compare people’s facial expressions when they look at art? (She looks disgusted, I hope my face looks better than that when I look paintings…)

Maybe we’ll start noticing a wave of people just posing in art galleries, hoping that someone will take a photo of them for the Metro or the Evening Standard…

Or maybe it’s just purely for fun. Look at the woman up there, she’s having a whale of a time!

In a less obvious way than page three, I it seems that this is another symbol of our bizarre voyeuristic relationship with women in the media. It’s basically like the supermodels who model cars, but instead of looking sexy and empowered aside what is essentially a piece of jazzy metal with an engine in it, they look reflective and thoughtful, because art is clever.

Harriet Harman retains her integrity in refusing to roll around in the mud for the Mail

Harriet Harman’s ability to swerve the debate from truly clarifying the National Council for Civil Liberties’ (NCCL) connection to the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), to haranguing the ethics of the Daily Mail was, if avoiding the original issue, masterful PR.

Masterful in the fact that feminism has, with help from the liberal press and campaigns such as No More Page Three and The Everyday Sexism Project, become a more frequently debated subject by a broader audience and Harman, as a feminist campaigner, couldn’t have chosen a stronger hot topic to distract from matters at hand.

As Roy Greenslade in the Guardian has reported, attacking the Daily Mail and by default its 20% Labour voting readership wasn’t the best move for Harman to make as Labour’s Deputy Leader. Perhaps things could have been resolved more quickly if she just apologized. It’s true that the NCCL shouldn’t have associated itself in any way with a group as foul as the PIE (and it’s really baffling that they were allowed to exist).

But, Greenslade lets the Daily Mail off too lightly. Particularly post Miliband’s dad gate, the Mail will do anything to drag Labour through the shit and, with this new revelation, we see that they are taking MPs down one-by-one.  In the Newsnight interview, Harman did express regret about NCCL’s connection to PIE so she has apologized in a sense, the only think left for her to do to the Mail’s behest would be to writhe around in the dirt issuing apologies Clegg-style. And nobody wants that.

By retaining her integrity and standing her ground, Harman refused to bow down to the Daily Mail’s smear campaign and you’ve got to admire her for at least that. She has come out of this mess retaining her integrity. After all, her points about the Daily Mail were completely valid. How could the Mail give anyone morality lessons on decency when they consistently print photos of naked or semi-naked boys, men, girls and women?

The Mail has made a very important point about the importance of charities monitoring who and what they affiliate themselves with. In turn Harman has been able to say what many are afraid to. The Mail will continue to degrade girls and women by publishing indecent images and words – and this has got to stop.

Click here to sign the No More Page Three petition.

What it is to be a woman in Cleo from 5 to 7

Watching Agnes Varda’s 1962 film Cleo from 5 to 7 last night inspired me to write a post about feminist films, something that I’ll continue to do as a reflection on portrayals of women historically in the mass media. Finding important references to feminism, be it in books, films or art, is often difficult and you have to spend hours trawling on the internet (!), so I thought my blog could provide people with some extra help!

I thought Varda’s classic discussed everlasting feminist issues, such as the trappings of female beauty and the prevalence of everyday sexism towards the beautiful so simply, and it was incredibly refreshing to see a classic French film discussing these issues instead of simply fawning over a sweet, fluttery-eyed naïf.

We see Cleo, a singer based in Paris who is praised for her good looks and grace, awaiting the results of a cancer test. From 5pm to 7pm, in real-time, Cleo matures dramatically as she rudely confronts the meaning of her own life and the matter of death. Varda majestically captures Cleo’s regression as she realizes the vacuity of her own life, and her eventual maturity, as she comes to the realization that true life should be seized when you may have little of it left to enjoy.

Cleo does away with her lover (who treats her like a princess clad in feathers and sugar) those who write her music (who do not respect her obvious talent for singing) and tries to forget her own material beauty. At the start of the film, she states: “Ugliness is a kind of death… As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive more than others” and is constantly looking in mirrors at herself. However she soon realises, when whispering “everybody spoils me, nobody loves me”, that unless she makes strives beyond just physical beauty, she will always preserve herself as a sex kitten with a cherubic face – always loved, sadly never respected.

In 1960s Paris, supposedly at a time when women could live independent, fashionable and liberated lives, it’s sad that Cleo could only do away with her obsession with beauty and perfection, and try to live a life where she could be respected for more than her looks, when faced with possible death. That shows that it’s only (some might think sadly) in extreme circumstances that people make the grandest changes to their lives.

Varda portrayed that even when women are given new positions of power, such as being celebrities, it is an endless struggle to deviate against the norm of a sexy, beautiful, successful female.

Cleo was constantly struggling against that role, and what is great about her is that she matures and finds relationships that are meaningful to her, casting off her old shackles. She grows as a person and decides to question her objectification. You can only hope, at the end of the film, when she receives the results of her medical results, that she can live to find herself again and again.

“It takes a great deal of courage to design your own image instead of one that society rewards”

I don’t want to be really reductive and suppose there is a typical woman, or a stereotype, as that degrades the amazing variety of female identities out there. However, when I was reading Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch over the past few days, I found some sage wisdom on what to do if you decide to design your own visual identity as a female, instead of one that society rewards. What if you don’t want to go to huge effort to look immaculate all the time? What if not wearing make-up doesn’t make you want to flee for a life lived under a rock? Here’s a useful quote that you can find on p.165:

In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who goes her own way will find her conditioning is ineradicable, but she at least can recognise its operation and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded.

Support for a ban on page three from those at the top is vital

David Cameron insists that he won’t support a ban of Page Three, unlike Ed Miliband, because, he says, there is a difference between newspapers, which parents could keep away from children, and the internet, where young people could stumble across hardcore pornography.

Does Cameron not understand that The Sun, the highest circulating newspaper in the UK, shines brightly everywhere? It dazzles in shops and cafes where you’d take your children at the weekend, it lights up adults’ waiting areas in crèches, illuminates supermarket cafes posing as drawing paper for children to scribble on, and even sparkles on pavements. I can’t count how many times I saw page three discarded on the street on my walk home from school, presumably by young boys interested in flashes of what they’ve not seen yet in the flesh. I wonder how they got hold of such naughty material?

If David Cameron knew more about young boys like those that went, from time to time, to my school in Doncaster, he’d know that hiding something from people doesn’t mean they won’t try to seek it out independently. He seems to naively believe that parents can save their children from enjoying black market sweets when deprived of them at home, taking a drag of a cigarette from a classmate who was old before her time, or even pouring through naughty magazines. What’s particularly sad is that Cameron is showing how far reaching his disconnect is from the common man, however many Ryanair flights he might take, or Cornish pasties he might eat at train stations.

If a young boy aged eight notices page three in a café amongst his bright crayons, he might ask what the woman is doing. He might then see similar things on advertisements and maybe, when his school friends get their hands on a porn magazine aged fifteen, he’ll see nothing unusual in what the topless girl with a huge smile is doing. That’s because he’s been used to seeing women represented in this way in magazines, newspapers, in film and on TV for so long. There’s something wrong with that.

David Cameron should think about the bigger picture. I’m not calling for the birth of a new puritanical world, The Handmaid’s Tale style, but stating that Cameron should perhaps look at the ways that women are portrayed across mainstream media and consider how this might impact on our behavior in regards to consuming online porn.  If women are portrayed as hot sexpots everywhere, men (and women) develop a taste for it and will pursue that kind of titillation (which is so reductive) in different ways.

We need a leader who might want to talk about the ways that the hyper-sexualisation of women in our media has an impact on the way we view women in society. In fact, it’s not just how we view women, but how we view sex.

We need someone who’s not afraid of speaking out against against major corporations like News International. We need people at the top to make bigger gestures. How else are things going to change, when street protests fall flat?

Hopefully Ed Miliband’s support of the No More Page Three campaign isn’t just gratuitous, eager-to-please opposition politicking.