Young women are planning their careers around having babies and new mothers are more likely to face workplace discrimination than ten years ago. Plus: Emma Thompson drops the mic; and turn down the air conditioning for women’s sake.

Workplace woes

To-have or to-not-have-it-all? Many women are increasingly wondering if they really can successfully juggle a career and children, and it’s a question without a definitive answer. Until now, perhaps. A recent New York Times article suggests that young women today are managing to keep that whole work/life thing pretty much balanced. How? By planning – and by lowering expectations.

More than ever, young women are reportedly planning their careers, and when to interrupt them, to better accommodate having babies, knowing that the workplace is still rarely a welcoming place for a new mother.

The New York Times reports that a Pew Research Center study found that “58% of working millennial mothers said being a working mother made it harder for them to get ahead in their careers, compared with 38% of older women”. It’s apparently one of the reasons women are “strategising” their lives earlier on, and choosing careers that will allow for a more flexible approach to work. “They’re anticipating that in some way they’re going to have to dial down or integrate their career and their life,” one female CEO told the paper.

It’s a savvy, if perhaps depressing, move – especially when you take into account the findings of a new Equality and Human Rights Commission report, published today, into the discrimination faced by women returning to work. It reveals that approximately 54,000 new mothers are losing their jobs across Britain every year. A number that has doubled in a decade.

Maybe there’s no clear-cut answer to that question after all.

Sexism by degrees (centigrade)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Exerting patriarchal power through the AC? Photograph: Ugurhan Betin/Getty Images

Sticking to thinking about the workplace, summer in an office is miserable for two reasons. One, you’re not outside enjoying the sunshine, and two, you’re inside and freezing because the air conditioning is ramped up so high you are swaddled in a scarf and your teeth are chattering louder than your colleagues’ complaints about the lack of semi-skimmed milk. To add insult to injury, if you’re a women, you may well notice that your male colleagues aren’t fazed by the icy temperatures. It’s this realisation that led Washington Post writer Petula Dvorak to the conclusion that air con is another vehicle by which the patriarchy can exert power.

There’s already evidence that suggests women feel the cold more keenly, so the fact that men aren’t wrapped in blankets at their desks , Dvorak believes, must mean that those in charge of the thermostat are male. After leading a straw poll of workers in other offices (no one’s pretending that this is a scientific investigation), Dvorak concluded that yes, the women were all freezing while the men barely noticed the temperature. Sure, women could swap their perfectly weather-appropriate clothes for something, say, woollen but the men, as Dvorak points out, could also wear less. Plus, Dvorak includes research that shows the warmer an office, the higher the productivity. So, men, take off the suit jacket, and turn down the air con. Please.

#Cringe

When it comes to choosing the right birth control, there are a couple of things that will help you make the right decision: information, and an expert’s advice. One thing you probably don’t need, or didn’t think you needed, is a website that creates something called a “shemoji”. And yet, pharmaceutical brand Allergan seems to think differently. The company has launched a new website and campaign that targets millennial women in need of contraception by talking to them in “their language”.



Using the hashtag #ActuallySheCan, celebrity endorsements from the likes of Glee’s Lea Michele and TV personality Lo Bosworth, as well as with live events, Allergan hopes to “help women get more informed” and “more educated, because those are real needs”.

There’s no doubting that Allergan’s aim to open up a conversation around reproductive health is an important one and that it makes sense to target millenials with an online campaign. But isn’t this all a bit patronising – to think that the only way women can engage in a discussion surrounding their health is in internet speak?

As Forbes writer, and Allergan customer, Sarah Hedgecock wrote:

[The campaign feels] like something devised by a person who learned everything he knows about millennial women from Buzzfeed.”

And despite trying to empower, the campaign appears to reduce millennial women to nothing more than selfies and spin bikes, suggesting that users add the hashtag #ActuallySheCan to posts such as “Selfie like no-one’s watching” and “Getting back on the spin bike”. Which makes you think tAllergan should spend less time on Instagram, and more time finding out what it would really take to open up a serious discussion around birth control.

Walkin’ in a women’s wonderland

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sophie Walker, who has been named as the first leader of the Women’s Equality party. Photograph: David Hughes/PA

After Sandi Toksvig announced she was co-founding the UK’s first feminist political party – the Women’s Equality party – back in March, everything went a bit quiet. But now, four months later, it looks like things are swinging into action. This week, the WEP finally gained a leader – 44-year-old journalist Sophie Walker. And an agenda, along with 58 branches across the country.

With 1,300 people becoming paid-up members of the party on the first day that membership went public earlier this month, the WEP is reportedly the fastest growing party in the UK. Of course, having only just been founded (it will launch officially in September), that’s not necessarily surprising. But if the WEP can keep a steady rate of sign-ups coming in, then it’s membership could easily rival that of some other not-so-minor parties in the near future.

“Looking at the tidal wave of support, I’d be very surprised if we hadn’t managed to take this mainstream,” Walker told the Telegraph, adding that she expects the WEP to have won seats in elections in the next five years.

But what will people be signing up for? So far, the party’s goals include equal pay, equal representation in the media, equal parenting rights and an end to violence against women. But the details of actual policies will come, in part, from the WEP’s members. As Walker told the Independent:

We’re starting from scratch, why should we do things the old way? We are opening politics up to real people. We’ll get policy suggestions from our members.”

Who exactly makes up the membership is hard to tell, although Walker is clear that it’s not just middle-aged white women. “The committee has got disabled people, men, women of black and ethnic minority race and gay people. And that spread really goes through our branches, too.”

Watch this space.

Thompson’s swift takedown

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emma Thompson: ‘I am not impressed at all.’ Photograph: Ben A Pruchnie/Getty Images

While Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj and their various cohorts have been busy getting into a very public spat with each other on Twitter this week, Emma Thompson has been having a go at the matter of sexism in Hollywood.



The actor, who (with the help of some expertly applied prosthetics) is soon to appear on screen as a 77-year-old sex worker, had some choice things to say about the state of feminism in the film industry today, telling the Radio Times:

I think it’s still completely shit actually. I don’t think there’s any appreciable improvement and I think that for women, the question of how they are supposed to look is worse than it was even when I was young. So, no, I am not impressed at all.

When I was younger, I really did think we were on our way to a better world and when I look at it now, it is in a worse state than I have known it, particularly for women and I find that very disturbing and sad.”

Of course, Thompson isn’t the only actor keen to point out the prejudices levelled against her gender. Recently, Thompson’s BFF Meryl Streep sent a letter to every member of Congress lobbying for the Women’s Equality Act to be made part of the constitution, and her other pal Helen Mirren didn’t mince her words when asked her thoughts on ageism in the film industry. And with every one of these articulate outbursts or actions, we can’t help but feel that it’s Thompson’s gang we really want to be part of, not Taylor’s.

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